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, and Yale University.

Starting in the mid-1990's 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, a member of AGI, and a Senior Critic on Yale's Graphic Design faculty. He has received the Frederic W. Goudy Award for outstanding contribution to the printing industry, the Middleton Award from the American Center for Design, a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the AIGA medal and the Type Directors Club medal. In 2004 he received the Special Commendation of the Prince Philip Designers Prize "for outstanding achievement in design for business and society."

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