Section: INSIGHTS
ON THE JOB
DRESSING UP THE WORDS YOU READ
YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T heard of Matthew Carter, but you likely read his work every day. He is responsible for fonts in the New York Times, the print in many phone books, and a famous Microsoft typeface called Verdana. Carter is a type designer. In his more than 50-year career, he has used almost every kind of design technology, from engraving the alphabet in steel to "pushing pixels" on a computer.
Does the alphabet ever bore you?
A lot of [nontype] designers want their bluer skies. There are only certain people content to continue struggling with these same constraints. You are drawn back to try to find some reorchestration of the alphabet that has something personal in it. Otherwise, why bother? You've got to have some arrogance to fancy that you can have valid interpretations over and over again.
How do you create something new?
I need grist for the mill. Some typefaces are based, to some degree, on historical models. I could find a book printed in a typeface that I like. If I'm traveling, I generally carry a camera. I've seen lettering on tombstones that is suggestive. It's a very eclectic business.
Do you have a personal style?
There are type designers who have a very strong personal style. It's like handwriting. I'm more of a chameleon. The consolation for people like me who don't have a strong style is that we can be better interpreters of others' work.
Are you obsessed with details?
You can get all the finicky details right and still have a bad typeface, in the same way that there is more to good architecture than beautiful doorknobs.
What's your opinion of graffiti?
I have seen tag graffiti that I think is wonderful, and I've photographed it. But I've also seen a lot of crap.
Do you get much recognition?
People don't necessarily know that people actually design fonts. If you were born with a huge ego, you'd get into a more glamorous profession, like fashion. But people do certainly know what fonts are. The fact that computers are now universal means everyone has access to fonts and people are exercising their aesthetic taste. They can say, "Oh, I like my memos or my menus to be in this typeface."
Do you ever disagree with the use of your typefaces?
I don't cringe if I see my typeface on a packet of frozen peas or whatever. I'm not a type snob. Type designers can only learn by seeing their work in use. We make these designs but they're hostages to fortune.
Matthew Carter
PROFESSION: Type designer
CLAIM TO FAME: The typefaces he's designed are ubiquitous, including Georgia, one of the most common fonts on the Web, and Verdana, a standard font used by Microsoft Windows.
PHOTO (COLOR): FONT OF KNOWLEDGE: Carter revisits the letters N and C for the zillionth time.
Mahan, Rachel. "Titan of Type." Psychology Today oct 41 (2008): 14-14.
"I always used to dread having to explain to a stranger what I do for a living," says Matthew Carter, a typographer who has been in the business for more than 50 years--he designed the font of the AT&T phone book, as well as NEWSWEEK's. "Nowadays, you can have an intelligent conversation with a 9-year-old about font."
Bennett, Jessica. "Just Go To Helvetica." Newsweek 7 Apr. 2008: 54-54.
| AUTHOR: | Esterson, Simon |
| TITLE: | A Life in Type |
| SOURCE: | Creative Review 25 no4 42-5 Ap 2005 |
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.mad.co.uk/cr/index.asp
(Part One)
Matthew Carter is the world's leading type designer. In the apt setting of the St Bride Printing Library, editorial designer Simon Esterson talks to him about his 50 years in the industry. Continued next month
SIMON ESTERSON: You are one of the very few type designers to have worked with metal type-setting, then photosetting, through the digital revolution, and then on to screen-based, non-print media. How do you feel about what has happened to typeface design in the last 25 years?
MATTHEW CARTER: [laughs] It's been 50 years, by the way, since I left school and started working in type. I'm happy to have had a traditional training, although even by the late 1950s making type by hand was obsolete commercially speaking. It never really had a commercial application for me. It's been very interesting to live through these various changes in technology. Through most of type's history, sons, grandsons, great grandsons came and went and the technology never changed. The opposite has been true in the last 50 years: the technology has changed faster than the typefaces if anything. So it's been interesting.
My own feeling about it: if you took all of the things that go into making a typeface, and you gave them a score out of ten, I would say that the technical part of it is worth one or two on that scale. In other words, however the type is made, about at least 80 per cent of it is still the same, whatever tools you use. There are exceptions to that. When I worked on Bell Centennial for the United States phonebooks, where the environment it's used in is rather hostile, the technology played a larger part. For phone books, we're talking about six point type on newsprint. When I did the screen fonts for Microsoft, I think more than 20 percent of that was technical influence. So that's my feeling about it. A lot of people disagree and believe that type cut in steel has different qualities, and I can look at beautiful letterpress printing from metal type and I can see that things have been lost. But in my opinion the gains in digital type far outweigh the losses.
It's a fatuous thing to say in a way, but if I had my choice of period in which to have worked in this business I would choose exactly the one that I happen to have lucked into, precisely because of all these changes. I'm endlessly glad to have survived into the digital era because I regard that as the best technology we've ever had. There are some drawbacks, there have been some losses, but for me, it's just a dream.
SE: I suppose designers who are used to working on a Mac, take being able to track and kern type for granted, when actually tracking and kerning with metal type-setting was very difficult, if not sometimes impossible.
MC: Keming is a good example: strictly speaking, there was kerning in the latter days of film composition, there were some refinement programmes and so on, but essentially it became part of type with the coming of Type 1 PostScript fonts, True Type and so on. I regard keming tables as a great blessing for typography.
SE: Once, the making of type was almost like a secret society: there was the mystique of being a punch-cutter and type-maker. Then it became quite an industrial process and Monotype and Linotype seemed to rule the world in composition terms: if they didn't make a typeface then it wasn't going to be made. Now, there's this incredible blossoming, where it seems as if everybody can be a type designer if they want to.
MC: I'm entirely happy about that. I'm sometimes a bit nostalgic about the time when it was a tiny club, when you had to go through painful initiations in order to be a type designer, but on balance, I'm glad the whole thing got blown wide open by the computer and particularly the coming of open font formats in the late 80s. There was a huge flow of interest in type design and it got democratised. There was no longer just a priesthood, but a sort of laity as well. I think a huge amount of very interesting work was done then, and some continues. What there is much more of, of course, are people who are primarily graphic designers or typographers, who occasionally make a typeface as a labour of love. This would have never happened in the old regime because it was just too hard to get started. Now, it's not uncommon to see student portfolios with typefaces they've designed and I'm completely delighted by that. It doesn't mean to say that everything made under those conditions are things that I like, but cream rises, and out of that ferment come very good things.
SE: Type design is quite stratified -- even in the Victorian era you had display type and text type, and there's been a lot of activity in recent years in exuberant display tyography. While you do some of these things too, a lot of your work is about what I'd call industrial-strength text typesetting.
MC: Yes, I think in my case there isn't a moral issue there, it's just a matter of temperament. Because I made my start in type founding, I never went to design school. I think that I've always been interested in these rather thorny, problem-solving projects, which are largely text faces. I have done a few display faces as well, but I seem to have mostly been asked to work in the text field, and I'm very happy with that. I don't think you're ever going to be a type designer unless you accept that you have to work within certain constraints.
SE: How does it work? Do you sit at home and wait for the phone to ring, with somebody saying 'we've got a problem,' or do you wake up in the moming thinking 'I have this beautiful idea for a lower case A, now I just need to do the rest of the alphabet?'
MC: I suppose both things happen. In an ideal world, life would be a nice balance between speculative projects and commissions. In fact I'm not good at bright ideas. If you sat me down in front of a blank computer screen on a Monday it would still be blank on the Friday. But if you said to me 'we have this typeface and it's a bit too heavy and too wide, fix it up,' I'd have something for you.
I tend not to get bolts from the blue very often although for example, a typeface like Mantinia was the direct result of going into an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1992 and looking at some lettering there. I wish that happened more often, I wish I could say 'I'm going down the road now, I'm going to see a plece of vernacular lettering which is going to turn me on and become a wonderful typeface,' it doesn't normally happen.
SE: So it's not the case that you walk down the street and see so much inspiring typography...
MC: Obviously, I do see things I like, walking down the street, looking at books and so on. A good proportion of the faces that I've done have been based, to some degree, on historical models, and I'm interested in the history of typeface design, but, as you say, a lot of my faces do come about because somebody calls me up with a particular problem.
SE: Can you give us some examples of working in that way?
MC: "There is a face called Fenway that I did for Sports Illustrated. They had been using Times Roman as long as the magazine had existed, and they wanted to change, partly because they felt it was too light and too scratchy and -- equally importantly I think -- they were just a bit bored with it. So they asked me to design them a new text face, a bit heavier than Times, but no wider, because the editors didn't want to cut down on words, and I think they were absolutely right to say that -- why would they sacrifice their writing so that I can go to hell with myself and make some unsuitable typeface?
So that was an example of a face that had a very tight brief. But there have been other instances where art directors have given me a much freer hand. Most of my commissions come from magazines and newspapers -- and not all the design directors of magazines and newspapers are primarily typographers -- they're very often graphic designers. They're great at using photography and illustration, but while they may sense the need for a new typeface they may not be able to articulate it exactly in terms of 'it's got to be 70 per cent Baskerville and 30 per cent Bodoni' or something like that, and so part of my job is to help clients decide what it is they do want.
SE: One of your skills is reaching back into history and looking at what people were doing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then interpreting that historical information in a contemporary way. For example, with Miller, you took a Scotch Roman from the 1800s and re-worked that form for The Guardian as a new text face, and then you remade it as a headline typeface for the Boston Globe.
MC: It started from an interest that I had in this historical Scotch Roman, which came from the foundries of Edinburgh and Glasgow. I was very much aided in this by James Moseley, previously the librarian here [at St Bride's Library], who had studied Scotch Romans and was quite a fan of them, so he was able to provide very nice examples that got me going. I had no idea when I was working on that, that it would make a good face for magazines, let alone newspapers... I wish I could claim that I foresaw it would be good for this kind of work.
SE: It's an interesting case to consider when looking at changes in newspaper production. We'd always been told with newspapers -- and I'm sure this is your experience with designing newspaper fonts -- that typefaces have to be thick and that they have to withstand hostile environments. But, in fact, it suddenly became the case that newspaper presses could do exactly what the magazine presses could do...
MC: Exactly, a whole new class of typefaces then became available to newspapers.
SE: And the technology is changing again, with newspapers increasingly being printed in full colour. Once that was a really special thing in newspapers, but now it's becoming as commonplace as it is in magazines. So I think art directors will be looking for typefaces that are bold, but still register well. Those are very specific adaptations that you've been involved in, to the extent of making special versions -- I think you call them disaster fonts -- for big banner headlines: specially drawn and condensed optimum characters. These are quite specific bits of typographic tailoring, then at the other end of the scale you've got something like your work for Microsoft, which is about universal application.
MC: Yes, it is. The problem with doing something like Verdana and Georgia, screen fonts for Microsoft, is how you stop them from being totally generic. Due to text sizes on screen, the resolution is such that you really haven't got a lot of information to play with to make really vivid differences between different text styles and so on. So then the question as you move up in size, and as you print these faces, is how you bring in the visual interest, so that when you do see them larger, they have some quality, without jeopardising their basic performance on screen.
So that whole episode with Microsoft is something that I very much enjoyed and was interested in, because it did have constraints, and a lot of difficulties. They've now got new ClearType technology, so it's become possible to do more detailed type on screen than used to be the case. I'm not sorry though that I had to do Verdana in those circumstances because it taught me an awful lot.
SE: Verdana's now almost the generic generic isn't it? Whereas Georgia, I think, is actually a beautiful typeface and it's almost a kind of secret... you don't even have to buy it, it comes free, and it's a really good typesetting typeface. It's remarkable how much material you actually see set in Georgia.
MC: And in Verdana too, I'm always surprised. When I was first approached by Microsoft about doing the screen fonts, I was aware philosophically that it could be a bad mistake. I had plenty of experience in the early days of photocomposition and the days of digital type of being asked to make typefaces for a particular technology and all I succeeded in doing was making a self-obsoleting typeface because the technology always improves. But they said to me, 'You may be right, but we're going to be stuck with affordable monitors at this kind of resolution for a good long time, so it's worth our while grasping the nettle and trying to do a decent job of screen fonts, rather than adapting printer fonts'.
So I did this work, and it is already being superseded by this new ClearType technology. But the nice thing for me is that, unlike some of the early digital types I've done, Verdana and Georgia have sort of made their own ecological niche as it were. They're not thought of as just screen fonts. So I think even when the resolution improves at some point, which obviously it will, those designs, and all of that labour editing the bitmaps, won't just be tossed out. And what you're saying is reassuring because these faces do get used beyond their original idea.
SE: We were talking earlier about the democratisation of typeface design through the introduction of new technologies. Do you think that, because people don't go through such a rigorous training process these days, standards may have slipped slightly, and do you see this as a problem or not?
MC: It's a very vexed question, I think that when desktop publishing first started, people expected it to have a much more catastrophic effect on professional graphic design, let alone type design. I tend to think that the more the reading public are conscious of type the better it is for all of us. You can't go into a bookshop and pick up a book and say 'Oh, this is in Times Roman, I'd rather have it in Bembo', go up to the counter and change it, but you can do that on the web. So one way or another, people are more aware of type.
Every office now has a computer in it and every computer has fonts. You can have a very intelligent conversation about fonts with a nine-year-old. People know what they are. I'm all for the democratisation of type, and while of course you do see examples that are awful, I'm very philosophical about that, because I think that in the end, the more familiarity people have with type, even if they're mis-using it out of innocence, the better it is.
A growing level of general knowledge about type is a very good trend. The odd horrible thing you see: well you just have to forgive that, experimentation is all part of the process, and sometimes someone will do something out of innocence that you might look at and see some merit in.
SE: The most dangerous thing is when everything is controlled by the professionals, that way, there is a box, and nobody goes outside it, or takes risks. I just wondered, in terms of fashion, do you think that Egyptian letterforms are the next big thing? The big, slab strong serifs and so on...
MC: Yes, I do see a number of them around, I'm always bad at forecasting trends in typography, sometimes I can look back and see why a typeface was successful -- but I can't predict these things at all, so I can't tell you what the next big thing is, although like you I've seen Egyptians in use.
I get asked this question a lot and I never know what to say in typographic terms, but what I do say and I firmly believe this, is that there are now more young type designers -- people in their 20s and 30s say -- and better ones than at any time in history. There is so much talent. So I don't know what the next style is going to be, but I believe there will be a lot of very good typefaces because the way you learn in this business is through experience... people come out of art school now, and if they have a talent for typeface design, they can start making a living almost immediately. It was ten years between my leaving school and my being hired by Linotype -- that was not wasted time, but I didn't really produce any work in that first decade that stood the test of time. There was a big gap before I could get myself in a place where I could do some work. So it's a much more encouraging situation now.
ADDED MATERIAL
Photography by Pete Moss
Type designer Matthew Carter (facing page) was born in England in the 1930s. He trained as a punch cutter in the Netherlands before working as typography consultant for Crossfield electronies. He later worked for Mergenthaler-Linotype in New York before becoming typography consultant to Her Majesty's Stationery Office in the 1980s. In 1981 he set up Bitstream Inc with Mike Parker in Massachusetts, the first independent American company to manufacture digital type. In 1992 he founded Carter & Cone Type Inc with Cherie Cone. Matthew Carter was named a Royal Designer for Industry In 1981. In his recent visit to London, Carter gave a talk at the Design Museum: for future events and exhibitions see www.designmuseum.org Simon Esterson is a magazine and newspaper designer. He has been art director of The Guardian in London and creative director of Domus in Milan.
With thanks to the St Bride Printing Library
MANTINIA 14PT
MANTINIA WAS THE DIRECT RESULT OF GOING INTO AN EXHIBITION AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY IN 1992 AND LOOKING AT SOME LETTERING THERE I WISH THAT HAPPENED MORE OFTEN, I WISH I COULD SAY, "I'M GOING DOWN THE ROAD NOW, I'M GOING TO SEE A PIECE OF VERNACULAR LETTRING WHICH IS GOING TO TURN ME ON AND BECOME A TYPEFACE"
FENWAY 14PT
Sports Illustrated asked me to design them a new text face, a bit heavier than Times, but no wider, because the editors didn't want to cut down on words, and I think they were absolutely right to say that -- why would they sacrifice their writing so that I can go to hell with myself and make some unsuitable typeface?
MILLER 14PT
Miller started from an interest that I had in this historical Scotch Roman, which came from the foundries of Edinburgh and Glasgow. I had no idea when I was working on that, that it would make a good face for magazines, let alone newspapers
VERDANA 14PT
The problem with doing screen fonts is how you stop them from being totally generic. The resolution is such that you really haven't got a lot of information to play with. So how do you bring in the visual interest without jeopardising basic performance on screen?
Facing page: Simon Esterson (left) and Carter in conversation at the St Bride Printing Library
Further reading
Carter and Cone
www.carterandcone.com
Matthew Carter's website
St Bride Printing Library
www.stbride.org
Yale University
www.yale.edu/printer/typeface/designer.html
Yale University's official website, with a feature about Matthew Carter and the typeface he designed for them
Pioncers of Modern Typography
Herbert Spencer, MIT
Classic text on modern type
Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors & Students
Ellen Lupton, Princeton Architectural Press
Twentieth Century Type
Levis Blackwell, Laurence King
Excellent primer on the history of type by former CR editor
Typographica
www.typographi.com
Online journal of typography with lively message board
GEORGIA 14PT
Verdana and Georgia have sort of made their own ecological niche. They're not thought of as just screen fonts. Even when the resolution improves at some point, all of that labour that I went through editing the bitmaps, won't just be tossed out. These faces do get used beyond their original idea
Esterson, S. A Life in Type (Part One) [Interview with Matthew Carter]. Creative Review v. 25 no. 4 (April 2005) p. 42-5
| AUTHOR: | Esterson, Simon |
| TITLE: | A Life in Type (Part Two) |
| SOURCE: | Creative Review 25 no5 52-4 My 2005 |
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.mad.co.uk/cr/index.asp
SIMON ESTERSON: Let's talk about the business of being a type designer. Do you draw entirely or do you work on screen?
MATTHEW CARTER: I work on screen, because I never could draw very well: I had to draw in the days of photo composition and so on, it's what we all had to do, but once I could get away from that I did. It seemed pointless for me to draw badly on paper and then clean it up on the screen. But that's one of the good things about this technology -- there are many different ways in. On the business of actually making the designs: for me the designing and making are very similar things and it's hard for me to untangle them. Of course there was a period historically and in my own life, where I could not make fonts: I could not make London type matrices: that's a hugely complicated industrial process. I couldn't make photocomposition fonts -- that was a whole mechanical business that went on in laboratories and so on. So when the Mac came and Fontographer came, for me it was just a beautiful thing, that I could go back to a situation in which I had a degree of control over the whole process. Cherie [Cone] and I started Carter & Cone Type early in 1992 -- we could probably have done it a year or two earlier, the technology was there, the market was starting to build up, Emigre had gone before us, the Fontbureau and so on. It's only been in the last 12 to 13 years that it's been possible for me to survive as an independent type designer. Frankly, it's not a lucrative business, but I don't complain about that because I'm so pleased to have my independence. As soon as the market, the technology and everything else came together to make it possible for type designers to work for themselves I think a lot of independent-minded people took advantage of that.
SE. With the technology changing so much, it's difficult to see what the role of companies like Monotype and Linotype is anymore. You can sit in your office, make a typeface, put it on your website and anyone can access and use it.
MC: Well if you are an aspiring type designer, you still have to get your work out there in the world. You can set up your own website, but if you've only got one typeface and you're new to this business, you're probably not going to do very well. So it's very tempting for beginners to associate themselves with larger organisations, such as Monotype or Adobe, or the Fontbureau.
SE: What are you working on at the moment?
MC: I am continuing with a project that I started some time ago, a series of typefaces for Yale University. Now I'm doing some bold faces for it. This is a family of type commissioned by the University, for general use by the faculty and students, for official Yale documents. Anyone who has an official connection with Yale can obtain and use these typefaces. I'm also doing some work for the New York Times Sunday Magazine: I generally have one or two publication projects going on at any time for magazines, newspapers and so on, and you need that because work goes off in the form of trial fonts to people, and they may get back to you quickly, they may take weeks, so you have to be working on someone else's job in the interim.
SE: When we used Miller on The Guardian, we realised that you'd done the most beautiful ampersand and in fact Mark Porter [creative director of The Guardian] designed a Comment & Analysis panel just so that we could use this ampersand. I think one of the things you do well is the characters outside the classic basic set: ligatures and the special characters that you seem to give an even greater attention to than most.
MC: I like all of that stuff. There are moments when I sympathise with a lot of type designers who do the basic caps figures, lower case and then hand it off to someone else, to do all the accents and things, but I've always liked doing that side of things, and I do insist on doing it still because I learn from the experience. And you're right, sometimes these slightly less important characters are great fun to design. In the case of Miller I think I had good historical precedents for those ampersands, not that that means a damn to the reader.
SE: Mantinia came from really historical principles, but it turned out being used on the front cover of Rolling Stone. It's a very interesting example of the transfer.
MC: Yes, I never felt that I was a very original or innovative designer where letterforms are concerned, but for the last dozen years or so I've been very interested by the idea of pushing on what is in a font. We have a standard computer font and it's a wonderful choice of characters in what it covers, but occasionally it's a little limiting and Mantinia is a good case, where I kicked a number of things out of the font which I didn't think were important and put in their stead some ligatures and other weird characters. They come from an inscriptional tradition rather than a typographic tradition -- but I like them and I thought 'I'll put them in the font, many people won't even know they're there, but some people may pick up on them,' and Rolling Stone was a lovely, gratifying case, where they got it immediately and really put the typeface through its paces.
SE: Then there's the project that you did for the Walker Art Center, which includes 'snap-on serifs' which allow you to customise the typeface for each different project.
MC: That was one of my favourite projects. But it could only really have been done in the particular circumstances of some sort of cultural institution, like the Walker Art Center which is a very prominent gallery of avant-garde art, with a very small design staff with whom I could interact the whole time. As the typeface was limited in its use I could make it fairly eccentric. I would be a little concerned, I think, about releasing a typeface like that into the broader market, because of the customer support calls I would get... people aren't used to thinking of serifs being separate characters, but working with the guys at The Walker, they are ahead of you, as it were.
SE: They put the serifs on an 0 didn't they?
MC: Yes, and they put the serifs in one colour and the type in another, took the serifs out of another font and put them on Helvetica... all sorts of things.
SE: You said, very modestly, that you're not imaginative with type, but I think you love italic... almost a forgotten type form. Historically there are fonts where I think the italic is much more beautiful and exciting than the Roman.
MC: I agree with you by the way.
SE: A context people might be surprised to find you in is Wallpaper magazine, for whom you've recently designed a specially-adapted italic.
MC: Yes, they encouraged me to add an enormous slew of ligatures and so on which was great fun to do. They use them well at Wallpaper in that they don't use too many of them. There are so many of these ligatures that you could make whole works out of nothing but ligatures, if you do that, it looks like a barbed wire entanglement, it's terrible, so they have become very skilled at picking and choosing which ones they use and when.
SE: I don't think you love sans serif quite as much as you love italic -- how do you feel about sans serif?
MC: If you flip through my checklist there are a good many sans serifs there but, as you say, a lot of them are special purpose designs of one kind and another. I don't quite know why that is. I love sans serif and I wish that I had designed more good ones.
The fact that serif faces predominate in my work probably has something to with the fact that a lot of my commissions are text faces and, perhaps more so in North America than in Europe, it is still fairly unfamiliar to find continuous text in sans serif. It's foolish of me not to design more of them, because they're what sell. If you look at any foundry's top ten sales, they're all sans serif, script faces.... [laughs] so the kind of faces that I design are the least marketable.
SE: Do you think there's a more limited frame of reference for sans serif, because there isn't that history that goes back all the way to stone lettering?
MC: That's a very interesting point, I hadn't thought of it that way. I was asked recently by a big company to design a sans serif and a serif family for a competition to do a huge corporate identity. I thought 'how are you going to make a sans serif face that looks distinctive enough to be used for a major corporate identity; that's really going to look different?' This was not like the Walker Art Center -- I couldn't do something freaky -- this was mainstream corporate work. So I found it extraordinarily difficult and I wasn't surprised when they told me I didn't get the job because I really didn't quite know where to turn.
SE: It strikes me that some of these exercises in making a sans serif for an international corporation are actually about managing the licence fees. It's cheaper to have your own typeface than to have to pay rights for every computer, printer and every usage across the world.
MC: You're absolutely right and that was one of the prime reasons for doing the Microsoft work [see CR April]. They partly wanted to do these faces because of the scale of operations at Microsoft, it's not that they're mean, it's just the book keeping involved... So it was always understood from the first interview about the screen font work that they wanted to wholly own these things. Normally, type designers will do anything they can to prevent parting with all the rights to a design because there are often residual benefits. In the case of Microsoft, it was a straightforward buy-out. I completely understood why they wanted to do that, and I didn't have a problem with it.
SE: Just to go back to the beginning: there must have been a moment when you realised you wanted to be a type designer... MC: It's a funny thing. My father [Harry Carter] was a typographer, and particularly a historian of typography, so I suppose I grew up absorbing stuff without meaning to. He didn't push me into following in his footsteps, but when I did start to show an interest he was very encouraging.
When I was working in Holland as an apprentice in 1955, my father was coming periodically to the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp, to help catalogue all the extraordinary treasures that were found there. Plantin started that business in 1555, and up until the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of his business in 1955, nobody really knew what was there. It turned out to contain Plantin's entire collection of type, just the best work of the finest period of typography: an astonishing discovery. I used to go down when my dad was there and help. I would sit in some attic room at the top of the museum and someone would put a box of punches they'd brought up for me from the basement and I'd rub at one with a toothbrush and look at it and say 'Oh, this is Garamond's Saint-Augustin Roman, how interesting,' and then I would think 'holy shit, I was just handling the punches of the greatest artist who ever worked in this field.' I was probably the first person for three or four hundred years who had looked at these things and knew what they were.
So that was a spooky experience and I had the run of the Plantin Museum, part of which is just as Plantin left it, I might add. When the public and the guards and the staff had gone home, I would wander around the place, so there was a feeling of intimacy with this history which I did acquire at that time.
Another thing that was very formative for me was that because of my dad's connections I knew a lot of people: I knew Stanley Morison and I knew Beatrice Warde -- all the eminent typographers of my father's generation -- and they were all extremely nice to me. But obviously I met them when I was a child and they did all treat me like a kid. Beatrice Warde would say things like 'one day, you must come and work at Monotype,' and so on. Then I had this strange experience in 1960: I found myself in Paris, and I telephoned Adrian Frutiger and Roger Excoffon, who were the two great type designers in Paris at that time. I went to visit both of them. Adrian and I became good friends, and he spoke quite good English. Then I went to see Excoffon, who spoke no English, and my French was even worse in those days, so how we communicated I don't know. He not only received me at his studio, but to my astonishment he took me out to lunch. We went and sat in a restaurant by the Seine, and even though we didn't understand each other, I sat down at that table a greenhorn who had done nothing, and I got up an hour later a type designer, because unlike the other people I knew, Excoffon treated me completely as an equal. I realised afterwards that this was a sort of ordination: a laying on of hands, so if you ask when I became a type designer, it wasn't when I designed my first typeface, it was when I got up from dinner with Excoffon.
ADDED MATERIAL
Photography by Pete Moss
Further reading:
Carter and Cone
www.carterandcone.com
Matthew Carter's website
St Bride Printing Library
www.stbride.org
Yale University
www.yale.edu/printer/typerface/designer.html
With a feature about Matthew
Catter and the typeface that he desigued for Yale
Walker Art Conter
www.walkerart.org
See Carter's typeface in use
Plantin-Moretus Museum
www.tnuscum.antwerpen.be/plantin_moretus
Home page for Antwerp's
Plantin-Moretus Museum
Typotheque
www.typotheque.com
Site for Dutch type foundry
Which includes wide selection of articles on type design
A Tally Of Types
Stanley Morison, David R Godine
A collection of essays about 20 classic typefaces, each set in the typeface under discussion
Type designer Matthew Carter (facing page, right) was born in England in the 1930s. He trained as a punch cutter In the Netherlands before working as typography consultant for Crossfield electronics. He later worked for Mergenthaler-Linotype in New York before becoming typography consultant to Her Majesty's Stationery Office In the 1980s. In 1981 he set up Bitstream Inc with Mike Parker In Massachusetts, the first Independent American company to manufacture digital type. In 1992 he founded Carter & Cone Type Inc with Cherie Cone. Matthew Carter was named a Royal Designer for Industry in 1981. In his recent visit to London, Carter gave a talk at the Design Museum: for future events and exhibitions see www.designmuseum.org Simon Esterson (facing page, left) is a magazine and newspaper designer. He has been art director of The Guardian in London and creative director of Domus in Milan.
With thanks to the St Bride Printing Library
YALE 14 PT
This is a family of type commissioned by Yale University, for general use by the faculty and students, for official Yale documents. Anyone who has an official connection with Yale can obtain and use these typefaces
WALKER 14 PT
THAT WAS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PROJECTS. AS THE TYPEFACE WAS LIMITED IN ITS USE I COULD MAKE IT FAIRLY ECCENTRIC. I WOULD BE A LITTLE CONCERNED, I THINK, ABOUT RELEASING A TYPEFACE LIKE THAT INTO THE BROADER MARKET, BECAUSE OF THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT CALLS I WOULD GET
BIG CASLON ITALIC 14 PT
Wallpaper encouraged me to add an enormous slew of ligatures and so on which was great fun to do. They use them well in that they don't use to many. There are so many of these ligatures that you could make whole works out of nothing but ligatures, is you do that, it looks like a barbed wire entanglement, it's terrible
Esterson, S. A Life in Type (Part Two) [Interview with type designer Matthew Carter]. Creative Review v. 25 no. 5 (May 2005) p. 52-4
| AUTHOR: | Ulrich Boser |
| TITLE: | A Man of Letters |
| SOURCE: | U.S. News & World Report 135 no6 44-6 S 1 2003 |
(C) U.S. News & World Report L.P. All rights reserved. For subscription information please contact (800) 338-8130. Web site: www.usnews.com
If you like what you read, you should thank Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter doesn't want you to notice the words you're reading. That is, you shouldn't be aware of the way the small, horizontal line at the top of the h hovers over the T at the beginning of this sentence. Nor should your eye catch on the heavy down strokes of a W that give the letter its classic look. "If the reader is conscious of the type, it's almost always a problem," Carter says. Letters on a page should "provide a seamless passage of the author's thoughts into the reader's minds with as much sympathy, style, and congeniality as possible."
And why should you listen to Carter? Because he designed these very letters you're reading right now--plus dozens of other fonts that appear everywhere from Sports Illustrated and the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible to muffin-mix packaging and the white pages of the Verizon phone book. His revision of some of the New York Times headline typefaces may soon debut; meanwhile, businessWeek will release its redesign on September 26, featuring three fonts fashioned by Carter, two of them custom-made for the magazine.
It's with good reason, then, that Carter has been hailed as the world's most well-read man. At 65, he is the elder statesman of type design, as well as one of its most skilled technical innovators. "He has a phenomenal sense of both history and technology," says Peggy Re, an associate professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and curator of the exhibit "Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter," a traveling show that opens this week at the University of Pennsylvania. "He will be considered one of the foremost type designers of the 20th century, if not also the 21st century."
A life in type. Born in London, Carter began his career making type the 15th-century way. His father, a famous English type historian and book designer, landed his 17-year-old son an internship at a Dutch type foundry. There Carter cut metal punches much as Gutenberg once did. In 1955, he was accepted to Oxford University--but opted to stay with type instead.
Since then, the arc of his career has followed that of the modern type revolution. In 1966, working for a New York-based type foundry, he created Snell Roundhand, one of the first faces to connect script letters. And in 1981 Carter cofounded the first digital type company, Bitstream, where he designed an early font for laser printers. Later, in 1996, he would develop Verdana, one of the most widely used fonts on the Internet.
And yet some of his most famous works have looked back, not forward. Carter's Galliard, which you'll probably find in many of the books on your shelf, was based on a 16th-century font. "Eighty percent of type design is unaffected by technology," he explains. "Letters are a straitjacket, really. You can't on a whim redesign a b so that it ceases to be a b." This tension between the functional and the aesthetic continues to keep Carter, one of 20 or so full-time type designers in the United States, planted in front of a computer screen for hours at a time. "You always have to find some variant which will cause a typeface to be different," he says.
Carter's work cannot be said to have a recognizable style. "Matthew is the quintessential craftsman," says Steven Heller, a design critic and graphic artist. "He is not an artist or experimentalist. He is interpreting conventional forms, and his genius is to take the classical, the traditions of typography, and bring them into the 21st century without seeming trendy. He has a knack for continuing the continuum." While the essence of individual letters hasn't changed for centuries, the digital age has made it far easier to make--and use--new type designs. In the 1950s, there were only a few hundred fonts in the Latin alphabet. Today there are more than 40,000. Microsoft Office XP alone comes with 170 standard fonts. "I used to be afraid of people asking me at dinner parties what I do for a living," Carter says. "Now it amazes me that I can have a perfectly intelligent conversation about fonts with a 9-year-old."
Of his many works, Carter's design for the phone book may have been the most grueling. In 1974, AT&T asked Carter, who was working for Mergenthaler Linotype at the time, to create the smallest legible type that could be printed on low-grade paper. Carter's creation, Bell Centennial, has notches at each right angle to prevent ink blotting. The font also has flat, short curves on the sides of g and s in order to increase the white space in the characters and make them more legible.
Letter by letter. Old books and gravestones as well as letters from the Hindi script Devanagari have all served as inspiration for new designs, and Carter's Cambridge, Mass., office is stuffed full with books. But perhaps the most impressive resource for design inspiration comes from his own memory: He can recall, for example, the alphabet his mother cut from linoleum during World War II to help him learn to read. They were a variation of Gill Sans, he says, and the first letters he thought of as objects.
Carter typically starts a new font by sketching the lowercase letters h and o on his Mac. Then he creates related straight letters like i from the h and round letters like c from the o, keeping a close eye on their weight and overall form by often printing them out; the resolution on a computer screen isn't high enough to see the smallest details. He works last on more "capricious" characters, like the lowercase g and uppercase Q, whose curlicues allow for more artful flourishes. (Experts typically identify fonts by the traits of these letters.) An entire alphabet can take months of painstaking work, with fractions of a millimeter making the difference between an artful letter and an ugly one. "Watching me work is like watching a refrigerator make ice," Carter says.
But individual letters aren't enough to make a good font. "It's only when three or four letters are set together," he says, "that one can start to compare them: 'Look, your h is too big alongside the o. Or, 'it's too thin' or 'it's falling over.' A letter only has properties relative to the letters around it." One reason that Carter designed the h to hang over the T in the Miller font that you're reading is to ensure that the uppercase letter doesn't overwhelm the word. "It's purely an aesthetic judgment," he says of the feature.
Some of Carter's most innovative recent work has been playing with the space between letters. The Walker typeface, which Carter created in 1995 for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, allows users to modify letters by adding what he calls "snap-on serifs." An E, for instance, can be connected by extending its crossbar to an O. Still, as 21st century as that work may seem, Carter refuses to prognosticate about the next big thing: "I've heard so many people talk about the future of type--and none of it's come true--that I've learned to shut up about it."
Picture: A IS FOR ALPHABET. Type designer Matthew Carter with one of his creations (JASON GROW FOR USN&WR); Drawing: Now Read This. Carter designed the phone book font Bell Centennial (top left and bottom) pixel by pixel. As in many typefaces, the o and other round letters hang slightly lower to improve legibility. The font also has notches at each right angle to avoid ink splotches. Carter's postmodern Walker typeface (top right) allows users to add short lines to connect letters--in effect becoming type designers themselves.
Boser, U. A Man of Letters [M. Carter]. U.S. News & World Report v. 135 no. 6 (September 1 2003) p. 44-6
| AUTHOR: | Alastair Johnston |
| TITLE: | SCOTCH AND WATER |
| SOURCE: | Print (New York, N.Y.) 52 no5 48+ S/O '98 |
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
Miller
By Matthew Carter
Carter and Cone Type, 1997; nine faces in the family; $282.
"Typography today does not so much need inspiration or revival as investigation," said Stanley Morison in First Principles of Typography (1936). As artistic director of the Monotype Corporation during the glorious interwar years between 1922 and 1932, Morison was responsible for establishing the canon of classic types that we are still familiar with today. His passion for the Italian Renaissance led to Bembo, Centaur, Arrighi, Fairbank Narrow Italic, Poliphilus and Blado; his subsequent passions for Fournier and Bell mined equally rich typographical veins. His legacy created the taste of most 20th-century typographers, but now it's time to move forward. What is required today is new typefaces suitable for new technologies. But as long as fontomongers are scanning type specimens of the metal era and hacking them into a workable shape with Fontographer, we must hope that those artists with understanding of the subtle nuances of weight, bite, and above all, letterfit, will be involved in the sensitive reinterpretation of the finest roman models so those letters will be more suited to their ultimate application.
Perhaps the most accomplished type designer working in America today is Matthew Carter. Apart from his obvious artistic talents, Carter was trained in the steel punch-cutting tradition. His credentials are unique for he even worked in phototype design in the gray days of the 1970s before emerging to prominence with Linotype, Bitstream, and his own digital foundry in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Carter and Cone. Among other proprietary types, he has created Fenway, a new text type for Sports Illustrated, which will be available commercially next year. He also recently completed Vedana and Georgia, a series of screen fonts for Microsoft that can be downloaded from their Web site for use in browsers (www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack).
For his latest commercial release, Carter has gone to the neglected yet vast 19th century for a new type called Miller that is destined to become as much of a standard as his Galliard (an investigation of Robert Granjon's types for Plantin), which was released by Linotype in the late 1970s and shines out among the mountain of Garamond and Granjon clones on the market. This new Miller type was quickly picked up by Simon Esterson in London for the British newspaper The Guardian, where it is used for the Arts & Entertainment section.
The basic group that Carter appraised for his new type is called Scotch Roman. Several typefaces of this ilk are more or less available: Monotype Scotch, Linotype Scotch, Monticello, and another Linotype face, Caledonia, which has been digitized as New Caledonia. The type originated with William Miller's foundry in Edinburgh, Scotland, around 1812. At the same time, Modern types from the Wilson Foundry of Glasgow show signs of being the work of the same cutter. There is every likelihood that these types were the work of Richard Austin, who was responsible for the superb series of types for the Stephenson foundry now known as Bell. The caps and figures of the "Scotch" face, in particular, show a family resemblance to Bell.
According to James Mosley, librarian of the St. Bride Printing Library in London, "Scotch face" is an American term used by the Dickinson Foundry of Boston and James Conner of New York in the 1840s when they revived the Miller type.
Scotch survived at Cambridge University Press in Boston through the 19th century and was used by it for the journal The Printing Art. Carter enjoys the fact that his location has been central to the perpetuation of Scotch in America. "It must be something in the water," he says.
The most successful 20th-century revival was that of W.A. Dwiggins, whose Linotype Caledonia became a staple of book and newspaper producers immediately upon its introduction in 1938, and continues to be popular today. But Caledonia was a hybrid of several concepts. As Dwiggins himself wrote: "Why modify Scotch? ... Well, there was a certain kind of wooden heaviness about the modeling of some of the original Wilson letters that didn't seem to need to be there. And when you get down to our own day, and the design had suffered the changes of many recuttings, the woodenness had become clumsier still--by reason of the 19th-century designer's obligation to strike all his curves with a compass and to get everything hard and symmetrical and shipshape from a mechanical point of view. Why couldn't you go back to the feeling about printing types that inspired the Wilson punch-cutter and then just liven up a few of his curves without changing the action and color of the face?"
But as Dwiggins found out, "Scotch doesn't stay Scotch if you sweat the fat off it." So he turned to the more slender Bulmer types, cut by William Martin, which he emboldened slightly. "About the 'liveliness of action' that one sees in the Martin letters: That quality is in the curves--the way they get away from the straight stems with a calligraphic flick, and in the nervous angle on the underside of the arches as they descend to the right."
As a finishing touch, Dwiggins added flat unbracketed serifs from the Didot tradition and created a unique letterform which has the color of Scotch without the awkwardness. So Caledonia emerged as Dwiggins's homage to an epoch, and Miller equally bears the unmistakable Carter cachet.
This is the key to a successful revival: The cutter has to be bold enough to leave his own mark but sensitive enough to do so with panache. While Miller is a different type from Galliard, they both have a Carter touch that marks them as his own and equally as types of our era, though I suspect they will both wear better than, say, Hermann Zapf's Melior and Michelangelo, types that characterize the generation of type cutters before Carter.
One of the problems inherent in re-creating historical models is to know which type to draw from. The "Scotch" types most familiar to us are a pastiche of Miller's letters, crudely enlarged from an unknown 12 point, according to Mosley. The familiar Scotch is loosely set and suffers from truncated descenders--the lowercase g stands out for ugliness. Another problem with the established model is the boldness and darkness of the capital letters that blot the page. For this reason, Carter returned to the earliest sources, the specimens of William Miller and Alexander Wilson's Sons preserved in London's temple of typography, the St. Bride Printing Library, just off Fleet Street.
Carter's Miller reverts to the curvaceous ductus of the originals, which show Austin's refinement of the Bell model (actually more French than English in inspiration) in the years between the 1796 S&C Stephenson specimen and the 1813 Miller book. This was a short period in which Bodoni and Didot had surfaced as the champions of a new, crisper, more dazzling typography. While English typography was just emerging in its first heyday with the presses of Bulmer and Bensley, it was in Scotland that printing and publishing was to flourish in the 19th century, with the Edinburgh Review, Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, and publishers like T.A. Constable & Co., and the Glasgow University Press run by the Foulis brothers. The fact that Scottish typefounders undercut the London market also added to this boom.
In addition to an extended set of ligatures, and an alternate capital R, there are two unusual accompaniments to the Miller faces. Along with a display size, which Carter has also redrawn, there are italic small caps, and also Greek characters for which the roman duplicate letters were rescaled at 80 per cent. This version is called Miller Classical. For the Greek, Carter followed the model of Alexander Wilson's Glasgow Homer Greek, a type cut for the Foulis Press by the famous professor of astronomy.
Regarding the italic small caps, Carter says, "In my researches at the St. Bride's Library, I found that the italics from the 1810s and '20s almost always had italic small caps. Fleischman had them in the late 1700s, and maybe Fournier too, but, as far as I know, those Scottish founders were first to do them as a standard part of the italic font. I'm a great enthusiast for small caps; there aren't enough books set entirely in small caps! It's a taste I share with Bodoni, so now typographers have no excuse for not using them."
The Miller figures are particularly noteworthy and reflect the typographic contribution of Richard Austin, who was the first to introduce ranging figures in metal type, but he wisely cut them to align with small caps rather than the full cap height of most modern figures.
Carter comments: "I don't know if the figures are unique to Austin, having that intermediate size. In the Miller and Richard types you get some like the Bell which are smaller than the caps, some where the 6 goes up and the 9 and 7 comes down. I like it as an answer for a text face which may find itself used in magazines. Real oldstyle figures look too bookish in a magazine, while capheight figures look much too big. I had the same business with Fenway, the Sports Illustrated face, where there are huge numbers of statistics in the text (every player's weight and height and so on): I found looking at the old setting in Times that the figures were too prominent. I didn't like traditional oldstyle figures. These transitional figures blend well with lowercase, because they are less literary looking."
Carter talks about Theodore L. DeVinne's championing of the Scotch faces in his work. The 1907 specimen book from the DeVinne Press in New York displays five pages of Scotch types as compared to six of Century Expanded, a face DeVinne commissioned for Century magazine. Carter says, "DeVinne's liking for Scotch has a lot to do with Century. James Mosley is right to see a relationship and resemblance, and more importantly, they had the same function: workhorse faces."
DeVinne said of Scotch: "Its most striking peculiarity to the inexpert is the greater breadth and openness of the letters without appearance of undue obesity. It has no eccentricity save the almost unnoticeable flat-top to the lowercase t." Mosley was adamant that the t should have a peaked top, but Carter quietly retained the flattopped model.
"Most of the faces we know as Monotype and Linotype Scotch were based on Scotch Romans which were later in style than the models I like," he says. "I think you can still sense Alexander Wilson in the ones I did. The others are more contrast-y; I like them less. The genesis of Scotch was a throwback, a reaction against Modern after all. The greater degree of modeling in the forms is a reaction against the sharpedged forms of Didot."
Like Dwiggins, Carter plans a display bold that will be rather condensed, as suitable for newspaper headlines. This latest consummate piece of artistry from Matthew Carter is likely to generate another Scotch revival in typography.
ADDED MATERIAL
Alastair Johnston, a partner of Poltroon Press in Berkeley, CA, writes frequently on type design.
Johnston, A. Scotch and water. Print (New York, N.Y.) v. 52 no. 5 (September/October 1998) p. 48+
