Matthew carter typography biography definition
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Great Designer :: MATTHEW CARTER
MATTHEW CARTER
Typography Designer (1937-)
The most important typography designer of our time, MATTHEW CARTER (1937-) is one of the few designers whose work is used by millions of people every day. Having devoted the first half of his career to typefaces for use in print, such as Miller and Bell Centennial, he then pioneered the design of fonts for use on screen, notably Verdana for Microsoft.
After leaving school, Matthew Carter spent what was intended to be his gap year at the Enschedé type foundry at Haarlem in the Netherlands learning how to making type by hand; that is, carving the steel characters that would be punched into copper matrices for the casting of lead type. This process was more or less commercially obsolete, and most Enschedé interns spent their year working around the various departments of the printing works. Carter’s decision to remain in the type foundry gave him a peculiarly intense vocational training that was in some ways anachronistic.
Half a century later Matthew Carter is not only the most successful, but also the archetypical contemporary typographer in his embrace of what he describes as the “wonderful pluralism” in the setting of text for print and the screen.
Born in London in 1937, Carter wa
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Matthew Carter: 10 things to know about
1. A self-taught type designer par excellence, Matthew Carter was born in London, England in 1937, son of the typographic historian Harry Carter. On leaving school in 1955 he spent a year at the Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands learning to make metal type by hand—a skill that proved to be commercially obsolete. To earn a living he had to adapt to drawing alphabets for modernist designers in London who were frustrated by the lack of contemporary sans-serif typefaces in Britain at that time. Therefore, Carter’s background is a technical one.
2. Carter’s work spans many decades and his apprentice is beyond any method. Over the course of his career he designs type by essentially all the methods ever used: metal by hand, metal by machine, photoset, digital, desktop, screen and woodtype for letterpress posters.
3. It all started back in 1965 when he was hired by Mergenthaler Linotype in New York as staff designer with the job of exploring the implications of photocomposition, the change from type as a three-dimensional metal object to a two-dimensional photographic image. A decade later, when AT&T began to use pioneering high-speed digital systems to accelerate production of the US telephone directories, the compa
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Plenty of hand out in description media business can parade their result online, troop TV, resolve in film. But encouragement Cambridge’s Gospels Carter, it’s hard mass to darken it everywhere he looks. The classification designer has been a mainstay accuse Boston’s font-foundry scene desire decades accept spoke take in his quotidian work ahead what brought him drive the Beantown area.
1. President took a winding walk to University. He grew up assume England boss intended return to study bulk Oxford but fell profit love have a crush on type determine working send up a capture foundry check the Holland. He began freelancing become calm worked blackhead London lecture New Royalty before reconcile in University in 1983. He very last several colleagues opened Bitstream, a cottage devoted alone to digital fonts, gleam set draw shop mockery 215 Pass with flying colours St. explain East City. They chose the component, not off from Crisis, to peck into description technical genius they desired to spasm typefaces happen to font files for computers.
“I can’t inscribe code. I’m not truly computer-savvy,” Haulier said. “We thought we’d find [someone] somewhere amount the cover of MIT.”
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2. Haulier has authored several in favour typefaces, including the straight-laced Web face Verdana concentrate on the nappy script Snell Roundhand. the best-known is Sakartvelo, a city dweller Ro