The most-read man in the world

The Economist - Dec 2nd 2010, 16:50 by G.F. SEATTLE

MATTHEW CARTER, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. "Have we met?" Mr Carter asked. No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. "Is your daughter a graphic designer?" he inquired. "She's in sixth grade," came the reply.


Mr Carter sits near the pinnacle of an elite profession. No more than several thousand type designers ply the trade worldwide, only a few hundred earn their keep by it, and only several dozens—most of them dead—have their names on the lips of discerning aficionados.
Then, there is Mr Carter. He has never sought recognition, but it found him, and his underappreciated craft, in part thanks to a "New Yorker" profile in 2005.
Now, even schoolchildren (albeit discerning ones) seem to know who he is and what he does. However, the reason is probably not so much the beauty and utility of his faces, both of which are almost universally acknowledged. Rather, it is Georgia and Verdana. Mr Carter conjured up both fonts in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with its Internet Explorer in the late 1990s and bundled them into Windows, before disseminating them as a free download.

Most fonts in use at the time were either adapted from type designed for print, or were created primarily for user interface elements. Georgia and Verdana were designed from scratch with monitor legibility in mind. But then, Mr Carter, now 73, has always been a man ahead of the times. For each successive technological revolution in type, he was among the first to create popularly used faces. An early creator and adapter of phototype designs, he worked with some of the first practical digital typesetting. These computer-driven systems lacked the horsepower to turn curves into bitmapped output. Instead, type was built on grid paper, pixel by pixel. Mr Carter designed Bell Centennial, a replacement for AT&T's 40-year-old phone-book font, in just such a fashion. The result was a more compact type that used vastly less paper.

And yet, in another respect, he has always been behind the times. During a teenage stint in the Netherlands, he trained with an eccentric designer to cut typefaces by hand, a process that involves working at two or three removes from the final cast-metal product. Such training was unusual even at the turn of the 20th century, when machine-aided cutting was the norm, but Mr Carter counts it as invaluable. "If I were born 10 or 15 years later, I could not have had some of my experience I had with metal type," he recalls fondly.

This respect for history is one reason he suspects that the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a 2010 fellowship, despite most fellows' average age being around 40. While the group never reveals its precise criteria, Mr Carter's citation included a mention of him having survived through a number of changes of technology. "Of course, it would have been hard for someone to do that if they weren't approximately my age," he quips.

The foundation made a wise choice. Having already created seminal faces read and seen by hundreds of millions of people each day on screen, in phone books and wherever else letters appear, he has no desire to slow down. Last year, Mr Carter designed a new face to be cut as wood type for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

The full story at The Economist.