Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, April 12, 2022: Matthew Carter, a British type designer (#1543)

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Artist of the Day, April 12, 2022: Matthew Carter, a British type designer (#1543)

Matthew Carter (1937) is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.

Carter's career began in the early 1960s and has bridged all three major technologies used in type design: physical type, phototypesetting and digital font design, as well as the design of custom lettering.

Carter's most used fonts are the classic web fonts Verdana and Georgia and the Windows interface font Tahoma, as well as other designs including Bell Centennial, Miller and Galliard. He is the son of the English historian of printing Harry Carter (1901–1982) and cofounded Bitstream, one of the first major retailers of digital fonts.

Carter grew up in London. Although Carter had intended to get a degree in English at Oxford he was advised to take a year off so he would be the same age as his contemporaries who had gone into National Service.

Through his father, Carter arranged to hold an internship at the Joh. Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands for a year. An extremely long-lasting company with a long history of printing, Enschedé had a history of creating conservative but popular book typefaces. Carter studied manual punchcutting, the method used to make moulds used to cast metal type, under P. H. Raedisch. Punchcutting was a traditional artisanal approach in decline many years before the 1950s. Carter is one of the last people in Europe formally trained in the technique as a living practice.

Carter's career in type and graphic design has bridged the transition from physical metal type to digital type.

Despite Carter's training in the art of traditional punchcutting, his career developed at a time when metal type was rapidly being displaced by phototypesetting. This reduced the cost of designing and using a wide range of typefaces, since type could be stored on reels of film rather than as blocks of expensively engraved metal. In a book on Carter's career, historian James Mosley, a few years older than Carter, would write of the period of their upbringing:

The Monotype classic [fonts] dominated the typographical landscape ... in Britain, at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality was undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The death of metal type ... seemed at last to be happening.'

Carter eventually returned to London where he became a freelancer. By 1961 Carter was able to use the skills he acquired to cut his own version of the semi-bold typeface Dante. An early example of his work is the masthead logo he designed for the British magazine Private Eye in May 1962, still in use. Previously the lettering had been different for the masthead of each issue; it was based on a font ('a bit of nameless juvenilia') which was never ultimately published. He also did early work for Heathrow Airport.

For ITC, Carter created the font ITC Galliard, based on the work of Robert Granjon in 16th century France. This matched a family interest: Carter's father in the 1950s had indexed and examined original type by Granjon at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and Carter had visited him several times to observe his progress.

Carter also advised IBM as an independent consultant in the 1980s.

In 1981, Carter and his colleague Mike Parker created Bitstream Inc. This digital type foundry was one of the largest suppliers of type before its acquisition by Monotype in 2012. The company however did receive extensive criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitisations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed, often under alternative names. While technically not illegal, this selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD would be described by font designer John Hudson as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type". In his role at Bitstream, Carter designed typefaces, such as Charter, and commissioned others such as Iowan Old Style from John Downer. Bitstream would ultimately be acquired by Monotype in 2012.

Carter left Bitstream in 1991 and in 1992 formed the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone. Carter's recent typefaces have been published by a range of retailers including ITC, Font Bureau and Monotype, often in collaboration with Carter and Cone, together with his custom designs created for companies such as Microsoft.

Of Carter's recent fonts, the serif web font Georgia is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century. It was based on designs for a print typeface in the same style Carter was working on when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller some years later. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and Miller, Carter said, "I was familiar with Scotch romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular ... and then they disappeared completely."

Many of Carter's fonts were created to address specific technical challenges, for example those posed by early computers. Charter was created to use a minimal number of design elements to fit in a small memory space on early computers, a problem that had expired even before he finished the design. The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that, "Verdana and Georgia ... were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white ... The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series." Some of Carter's early font digitisations would later be revisited: Monotype released an expanded version of Charter and Font Bureau expanded versions of Georgia, Verdana, Big Caslon and others. Earlier in his career, Bell Centennial was created to be legible in telephone directories, even when printed on cheap paper at small sizes.

Carter's only font to bear his name is Carter Sans. It is a 'glyphic' sans-serif with flaring towards the end of each letter.

One of Carter's more unusual projects was a font, Van Lanen, for the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum. A 'Latin'-style wedge serif font, it was released both in digital form and wood type. In an article on it, Carter noted that it has been "50 years since a type of my design had been in a physical form that I could hold in my hand."

Carter has taught on Yale University's graphic design programme since 1976. He also designed the university's corporate fonts, Yale, at the request of John Gambell, the University Printer. Carter has said that this was the first time in designing a typeface that he focused more on capital than lowercase letters, since he knew that on the building signs the lettering would be in capitals.

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