He attended Washburn College, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Fraternity, the yearbook editor and designer.

[2][5] Later in 1938, Thompson began working with the arts journal of West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, Westvaco Inspirations for Printers.

The booklet was meant to showcase the company's papers and Thompson began experimenting with typography, photographic reproduction and color, drawing inspiration from printing elements and borrowing plates and separations from museums, magazines, and advertising agencies.

His typographic alignment of the text broke the standard of flushed columns that the Gutenberg Bible set.

[3][8][9] In 1988, his autobiography, "The Art of Graphic Design," was published by Yale University Press.

His monoalphabet was a transitional serif (modelled after Baskerville) with lowercase a, e, m, and n mixed with uppercase B, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, P, Q, R, T, U, and Y.

[11] The set of letters for Alphabet 26 (normal and bold weights) is: The following example uses the CSS rule font-variant-caps: unicase (for all lowercase letters only), which was not supported by many browsers as of July 2017: The following closer approximation, using the CSS rule font-variant-caps: small-caps (on specific lowercase letters), should work in most current browsers (but may suffer from slight variations in weight and height): Thompson died on November 1, 1995, in Greenwich, Connecticut.