MAN OF LETTERS.(Matthew Carter, type designer)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-DEC-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Matthew Carter is often described as the most widely read man in the world. Carter designs typefaces. He is universally acknowledged as the most significant designer of type in America, and as having only one or two peers in Europe. A well regarded British type designer named Dave Farey once told a reporter, "There's Matthew Carter, and then there's the rest of us."

Carter is sixty-eight. He is British, and he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He works in a room in his apartment. He has designed type for magazines such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Sports Illustrated, Wired, National Geographic, and Business Week; and for newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Guardian, in London. He designed Verdana, for several years the signature typeface of Microsoft; Bell Centennial, the typeface used by A.T. & T. in the phone book; and type called Galliard, which has been used by the U.S. Postal Service on a stamp.

Carter has a partner named Cherie Cone who lives in California and sees to the business side of their firm, which is called Carter & Cone Type. Recently, he's been engaged with three projects. One involved designing type for Le Monde, the French newspaper, which wanted a different appearance; one, still under way, is for Yale, where Carter teaches (the university wants a typeface for its official documents, its signs, and the work of its students and faculty); and the third was for the Times. The Times wanted for its magazine an alphabet of the face it uses to print its name. All the paper had were the letters that spell "The New York Times."

A typeface customarily has two hundred and twenty-eight characters, including letters, accents, numerals, fractions, ligatures (the structures that in certain faces join letters together); commercial signs, such as those for the dollar and the euro; and punctuation marks, ampersands, and peculiars, such as asterisks and daggers for footnotes. A type designer typically produces four versions of a face: roman--that is, upright--letters, italic, bold roman, and bold italic. Such a grouping is called a family. Carter has designed sixty-two families, which include two hundred and sixty-three faces. A few designers may have designed more--no records are kept--but not many.

Carter designed the typeface for the phone book in 1978. He was then working for a company in New York called Mergenthaler Linotype. The previous face had been in use since 1937. A phone book lasts longer than a newspaper, but not long enough to justify its being printed on good paper with good ink. Subscribers had told the company that the current type, called Bell Gothic, was too spindly to read easily. It looked starved, they said. No known typeface read clearly at the size the company wanted. They refused to make the type larger, because adding pages was expensive. The phone company's instructions were that, regardless of the design, the same amount of information must appear on the page.

Carter tried making all the numbers different sizes from each other, as they are in certain antique typefaces, but when he saw the numbers printed it looked as if they were faintly vibrating. The phone book is set in four categories of type: one for names and numbers; one for addresses; one in boldface, mainly for businesses; and one for entries called sub-captions, which is used for listings contained under a heading--the departments of a museum, for example. Carter's solution was to make the typeface for addresses narrower, and the one for names and numbers wider and heavier, which saved space and therefore a lot of money.

There are graphic designers and artists who like to enlarge type to see whether anomalies appear. If you substantially enlarge the "B" in Bell Centennial, the white space looks like two bells lying on their sides. Carter says this was unintended.

Carter is tall and lanky. His carriage is erect. He moves gracefully. When he was young, he had brown hair, but now it is gray and long enough to be pulled back in a small ponytail, which makes him look a little like a barrister. He has blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a cleft in his chin. He talks out of the right side of his mouth. His skin is pale. He lives with a woman named Arlene Chung, who is an artist. His manner is polished and gracious, so it takes a while to realize, mostly from hesitations in his speech, and the measured quality of his voice, that he is not given to revealing himself easily.

Choosing wine in a store, Carter looks for a bottle that has type he designed on the label. He likes to watch movies with an eye out for anachronistic appearances of type. In a movie set in 1939, he saw a document printed with a version of a typeface called Snell Roundhand Bold, an elaborate script which is used mainly for monograms, engravings, and on the menus of fancy restaurants, and which he designed in 1972. (The script was based on the handwriting of a seventeenth-century British writing master named Charles Snell.) Another time, at an antique auction, he saw a poster announcing the sale of slaves, which was being offered as genuine. He noticed that some of the writing was in a typeface invented in the...

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