Matthew Carter

According to Eye Magazine, in 1981, Carter co-founded Bitstream Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Mike Parker and two other colleagues.² According to Eye Magazine, Carter and Cherie Cone founded Carter & Cone Type in 1992.² According to Eye Magazine, Carter released a version of ITC Galliard with expert sets approximately fifteen years after the face was originally created.²

According to PRINT Magazine, Carter was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2010.^3,4 According to PRINT Magazine, Carter collaborated with Berthold Wolpe in 1980 to develop an updated version of the Pegasus typeface.³ According to TED Talks, Carter gave a TED Talk titled 'My life in typefaces' at TED2014, lasting about 16 minutes.⁵

According to Eye Magazine, Matthew Carter is a type designer born in London in 1937.^1,2,6 According to Eye Magazine, his father, Harry Carter, was a historian of printing and typography.^1,2 According to Eye Magazine, “Carter was typographic consultant to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office from 1980 to 1984”.²

According to TypeRoom, after leaving school in 1955, Carter spent a year at Enschedé in the Netherlands learning to cut metal type by hand.^1,6 TypeRoom says the hand metal-type skill Carter learned at Enschedé later proved commercially obsolete.¹ According to TypeRoom, Carter created multiple typefaces tailored to technical constraints, including CRT Gothic in 1974 and Video in 1977.¹

According to TypeRoom, his typefaces include Bell Centennial, ITC Galliard, Miller, Georgia and Verdana.^1,4 According to TypeRoom, Bell Centennial was among Carter’s designs addressing constraints of a particular reproduction technology.¹ According to TypeRoom, Carter taught a class at the Yale graphic design school for over 30 years.¹

According to TypeRoom, Carter was appointed CBE in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to typography and design.¹ According to TypeRoom, Carter was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 Birthday Honours.¹ According to Matthew Carter, Carter based Miller on the Scotch Roman tradition and researched historical examples at London’s St Bride Library.⁴ The Boston Globe reports Carter assigned Georgia’s rights to Microsoft and received no royalties afterward.⁷

A PRINT interview states that exclusive type-design livelihoods were once rare and, except for Frederic W. Goudy, usually tied to foundries.³ Carter says Miller and Wrigley began as speculative designs and later found clients and business.³ According to Matthew Carter, in the early 1960s at Deberny & Peignot, Adrian Frutiger showed Carter designs begun in white paint on black paper.³

Carter said Frutiger's white-on-black method involved drawing the space around a letter rather than the letter itself.³ Carter's type designs include some of the world's most familiar digital typefaces, according to TED.^5,7 According to TED speaker page quotation, TED describes Carter as 'the most important typography designer of our time.'⁵

According to Design and typography commentators, designers and industry commentators view Matthew Carter as one of the most prominent typographic designers of his era.^4,5 According to Eye magazine, Bitstream Inc. is described as the first American independent digital typefoundry.² Carter said metal type's limited available sizes required designers to work within a fixed selection.^1,2

According to TypeRoom, TypeRoom calls Carter a self-taught type designer, alongside noting his foundry training.¹ According to TypeRoom, TypeRoom dates Georgia and Verdana to 1996.¹ According to The New Yorker, the New Yorker commented in 2005 that Carter designs typefaces.¹

According to Matthew Carter, Carter first visited New York in 1960 and was struck by the graphic and typographic design he saw there.⁴ According to Matthew Carter, Carter recalls first visiting New York in 1960 and not seeing Helvetica in London in 1961, though Haas had produced it in 1957.⁴ Carter said that 80 to 90 percent of designing a typeface is the same regardless of the production medium.⁴