Matthew Carter in Type Designing - Essay Example

MATTHEW CARTER Matthew Carter is the most prominent typography designer of our time who has carved a special niche for himself in the graphic designworld. Matthew Carter (Museumdesign.org) Carter’s Introduction to Type Making Carter was born in 1937 in London. He developed an interest in type by watching his father Harry go about his work as a typographer, designer of books and type historian. After finishing school in 1955, Carter was selected for admission in Oxford University provided he completed a 12 month internship studying punch cutting at Johannes Enschede en Zonen in Haarlem, Holland. Carter was thus introduced to the world of type making. In Enschede, he was taught how to create type {a tiny metal piece having a raised character on one end, which generates a printed character when inked and pressed on paper} by hand; the process involved etching the steel characters that were then punched into cooper molds for the formation of lead type. Although this procedure was nearly out-of-date commercially {due to which the majority of his fellow trainees preferred to spend their time working in other sections of Enschede}, Carter’s firm choice to continue working in the type foundry provided him a uniquely strong vocational training that was in some ways inappropriate at that time. Carter became so immersed in his work that he decided to reject acceptance by Oxford and instead pursue a career as a freelance designer and lettering artist in London. He also helped his father set up a small museum covering the history of Oxford University Press (Designmuseum.org). Carter’s Introduction to Type Designing Carter visited New York four years after completing his internship at Enschede. The visit introduced him to the world of type designing, in which he soon developed intense interest. He was astounded by the positive advancement in typographic creations as evidenced in the compositions of designers like Milton Glaser, Herb Lubalin and others that contributed to the progressiveness of New York’s commercial art industry in 1960 (Designmuseum.org). Carter’s Initial Career in Graphic Designing When Carter returned to London from New York, he found that its commercial art scene lacked contemporary sans serif type. He joined forces with men such as Alan Fletcher, Bob Gill, David Collins, Colin Forbes and others to create many sans serif faces for the country’s young and inexperienced graphic design industry. One such sans serif face was made for Heathrow airport’s new terminal. Carter’s fascination with New York’s progressiveness lured him to the U.S again. He took up employment at Mergenthaler Linotype located in Brooklyn. While being intensely influenced by its director of typographic development Jackson Burke, Carter began threw his heart and soul into his work and started designing new typefaces for photocomposition. One of them was Snell Roundhand, a script face that he created in 1966 that exquisitely displayed the relative advantages of photosetting (Designmuseum.org). Although he returned to London in 1971 as a freelance designer, Carter maintained a working relationship with Mergenthaler Linotype companies in the U.S, Germany and U.K and spent the next decade creating designs for them. Famous among such designs was Bell Centennial, a typeface he created in 1974 to facilitate the telephone directories of U.S telecommunications giant AT&T – a typeface that continues to be used to this day. Another outstanding creation was Galliard, which Carter designed in 1978. Founded on Robert Granjon’s forms of the 16th century, its unique full character set permits a text to be entirely structured with its argument physically clear, thus representing an exceptional package that has made it the publishing sector’s accepted norm for academic books, journals and art brochures (Designmuseum.org). Carter Establishes his Own Business Carter resigned from Mergenthaler Linotype in 1981 and established a new digital type design organisation called Bitstream in Cambridge {Massachusetts} with 3 colleagues from Linotype – Mike Parker, Cherie Cone and Rob Friedman. Quickly recognising that sale of typesetting equipment was regularly plummeting, Carter realised that designing and setting of type itself presented a lucrative alternative. Under his astute leadership, Bitstream soon began producing digital type – including Carter’s personal 1987 creation the Bitstream Charter – which was licensed to be used by any individual. Carter’s brainwave was highly successful. Bitstream did excellent business during the 1980s when digital design and creation, desktop publishing and personal computers started being used by almost everyone in the Western world (Designmuseum.org). Although Bitstream continued flourishing, Carter became restless as there was no time or scope for type designing. He resigned from Bitstream in 1991 and established a new organisation with Cherie Cone called ‘Carter and Cone Type’ (Designmuseum.org). The business of the new organisation was to produce and market custom type solutions to worldwide clients (Monotype Imaging). Capitalising on the prominent 1990s trend of creativity, Carter created Sophia and Mantinia in 1993. His next creation, named Wrigley, was commissioned by Sports Illustrated. The magazine’s art director was so appreciative of Carter’s capability to couple classic qualities with beauty appreciation, that he described Wrigley as “an Egyptian [slab serif] with a 90s feeling.” The success of Wrigley was such that, despite possible conflict of interest, it earned Carter orders from U.S News & World Report, Time and Newsweek (Designmuseum.org). Carter next designed Verdana in 1994 for Microsoft – easily his most famous creation; designed for the electronic screen, millions of copies of this stylishly graceful gatekeeper of a massive amount of information have been issued all over the world. Carter went on to design a large number of typefaces during the subsequent years. In 1995 he designed Sophia and Walker for the Museum of Fine Arts {Boston} and the Walker Art Center {Minneapolis} respectively. In 1997 he designed Miller, a typeface founded on 19th century Scotch Roman faces; it soon became the preferred choice of several newspapers including The Guardian of the U.K. In 2004 he designed a signage typeface called Yale for Yale University (Designmuseum.org). Reasons why Carter has made his Mark in the Graphic Design World Matthew Carter has emerged as the most distinguished and conspicuous typography designers of the current era. He ranks as a member of a very small, elite group of designers whose creations are being utilised daily by millions of individuals around the world. Carter has left an indelible mark in the graphic design world because of two unique works: typefaces to be used in print, and font designs to be used on screen (Designmuseum.org). In the first category, Carter invented several typefaces for different corporate customers. The most prominent among them are Yale University, Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Wired magazine and the Walker Art Center. In the second category, he invented several notable screen font designs, especially Verdana, Tahoma and Georgia typefaces {all designed for Microsoft}, as well as other typefaces designed for the Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Devanagari writing systems (Monotype Imaging). In his unique position as one of the last individuals to have studied the art of creating metal type by hand, Carter’s knowledge of letters is exceptionally intimate. This knowledge covers not only the form of the letter, but its counter form, the entire amount of space covered by the letter, as well as the indirect suggestions for the space it shares with the next letter and the entire collection of letters on a page. Carter has likened the designing procedure to knitting: both start with an h and an o which provide the height of upward moving strokes and the curves, and then utilise the decisions made about the ‘control’ characters to the remaining alphabets (Designmuseum.org). Today, Carter holds the distinguished position of the most successful living typographer of ‘wonderful pluralism’ in text setting for print and the computer screen. He has the rare ability to invent letters that fulfill his clients’ expectations of genuine authorial voice {something that has eluded designers since the arrival of the Macintosh in the 1980s}, word count and printing skill, reassuring them that they are not hiring a designer with a delightful style but a craftsman of outstanding ability who reacts to distinctive circumstances. The proof of Carter’s outstanding achievements in the graphic design world lies in the massive number of customers who currently benefit from them every day: People in North America refer to names in Bell in telephone directories, news is read in Miller on either side of the Atlantic, and the entire world peruses Internet contents in Verdana (Designmuseum.org). Although currently aged 72, Carter continues to use his exceptional talent for the benefit of others. He is associated with nonprofit organisations like the Type Directors Club, the Society of Typographic Aficionados and the American Graphic Arts Institute (Monotype Imaging). He presently serves as Senior Critic at Yale University School of Art, a position he has held for more than 3 decades (Designmuseum.org). Carter has received several awards and titles for his contribution to the graphic design world; noteworthy among them are the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the Frederic W. Goudy Award and an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts (Monotype Imaging). References used: “Biography: Matthew Carter.” Monotype Imaging. 2009. 7 Apr. 2009. “Matthew Carter.” Designmuseum.org. 2005. 7 Apr. 2009. Read More