Matthew Carter

He is the son of the English historian of printing Harry Carter (1901–1982) and cofounded Bitstream, one of the first major retailers of digital typefaces.

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carter grew up in London, the son of Harry Carter, a book designer and later historian of printing.

His mother worked in preparing scale drawings.

Although Carter had intended to get a degree in English at Oxford he was advised to take a year off so he would be the same age as his contemporaries who had gone into National Service.

Through his father, Carter arranged to hold an internship at the Joh. Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands for a year.

An extremely long-lasting company with a long history of printing, Enschedé had a history of creating conservative but popular book typefaces.

Carter studied manual punchcutting, the method used to make moulds used to cast metal type, under P. H. Rädisch.

Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is a British type designer.

Punchcutting was a traditional artisanal approach in decline many years before the 1950s.

Carter is one of the last people in Europe formally trained in the technique as a living practice.

Carter enjoyed the experience, and decided to move directly into a career in graphic design and printing.

Carter's career in type and graphic design has bridged the transition from physical metal type to digital type.

Despite Carter's training in the art of traditional punchcutting, his career developed at a time when metal type was rapidly being displaced by phototypesetting.

This reduced the cost of designing and using a wide range of typefaces, since type could be stored on reels of film rather than as blocks of expensively engraved metal.

In a book on Carter's career, historian James Mosley, a few years older than Carter, would write of the period of their upbringing:

This matched a family interest: Carter's father in the 1950s had indexed and examined original type by Granjon at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and Carter had visited him several times to observe his progress.

Carter's adaptation, more intended for display use than for body text, included some eccentricities of Granjon's original design, producing a result unlike many previous revivals of typefaces from the period.

Carter wrote of his father's research that it had helped to demonstrate "that the finest collection of printing types made [by Christophe Plantin] in typography's golden age was in perfect condition (some muddle aside) [along with] Plantin's accounts and inventories which names the cutters of his types."

Carter's career began in the early 1960s and has bridged all three major technologies used in type design: physical type, phototypesetting and digital type design, as well as the design of custom lettering.

Carter's most used typefaces are the classic web typefaces Verdana and Georgia and the Windows interface typeface Tahoma, as well as other designs including Bell Centennial, Miller and Galliard.

"The Monotype classic [fonts] dominated the typographical landscape ... in Britain, at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality was undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The death of metal type ... seemed at last to be happening.'"

Carter eventually returned to London where he became a freelancer.

By 1961 Carter was able to use the skills he acquired to cut his own version of the semi-bold typeface Dante.

An early example of his work is the masthead logo he designed for the British magazine Private Eye in May 1962, still in use.

Previously the lettering had been different for the masthead of each issue; it was based on a typeface ('a bit of nameless juvenilia') which was never ultimately published.

He also did early work for Heathrow Airport.

Carter would later become the typographic advisor to Crosfield Electronics, distributors of Photon phototypesetting machines.

Carter designed many typefaces for Mergenthaler Linotype as well.

Under Linotype, Carter created well-known typefaces including Snell Roundhand, a script typeface and Bell Centennial, intended for use in the Bell System's phone directories and to celebrate its anniversary.

Carter also advised IBM as an independent consultant in the 1980s.

In 1981, Carter and his colleague Mike Parker created Bitstream Inc. This digital type foundry was one of the largest suppliers of type before its acquisition by Monotype in 2012.

The company however did receive extensive criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitisations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed, often under alternative names (for example, Times New Roman as 'Dutch 801').

While technically not illegal, this selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD would be described by type designer John Hudson as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type".

In his role at Bitstream, Carter designed typefaces, such as Charter, and commissioned others such as Iowan Old Style from John Downer.

Carter left Bitstream in 1991 and in 1992 formed the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone.

Carter's recent typefaces have been published by a range of retailers including ITC, Font Bureau and Monotype, often in collaboration with Carter and Cone, together with his custom designs created for companies such as Microsoft.

A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used typefaces.

Bitstream would ultimately be acquired by Monotype in 2012.

Based on the work of Robert Granjon, a 16th century French engraver, Carter created the sharp, high-contrast family Galliard.