Untypical Types
with
Matthew Carter
Much of my work has been concerned with utilitarian typefaces, self-effacing designs for setting text in newspapers or magazines on paper or online. These have often had to deal with issues of legibility in difficult production situations. On the other hand, from time to time I have had a chance to design types that are less run-of-the-mill, in the sense that they were not primarily meant for text setting or solving technical problems. I describe four of these "untypical" designs in detail, explain the backstory behind the unusual manner in which they came about, and show examples of them in use.
About Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter is a type designer with fifty years’ experience of typographic technologies ranging from hand-cut punches to computer fonts. After a long association with the Linotype companies he was a co-founder in 1981 of Bitstream Inc., the digital typefoundry, where he worked for ten years. He is now a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designers and producers of original typefaces. His type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand, Shelley Script, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian (for newspaper text), Bell Centennial (for the US telephone directories), ITC Charter, and faces for Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Devanagari. For Carter & Cone he has designed Mantinia, Sophia, Elephant, Big Caslon, Alisal and Miller. Starting in the mid-’90s Carter has worked with Microsoft on a series of “screen fonts” designed to maximize the legibility of type on computer monitors. Of these, Verdana, Tahoma and Nina (a condensed face for hand-held devices) are sanserif types; Georgia is a seriffed design.