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 and Shelley scripts, 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.

Carter & Cone have produced types on commission for Time, Newsweek, Wired, U.S. News & World Report, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, and the Hamilton Wood Type Museum.

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.

Carter is a Royal Designer for Industry, and a Senior Critic on Yale’s Graphic Design faculty. He has received a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the AIGA medal and the Type Directors Club medal. In 2010 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian National Design Awards.