FYI: There is an article about Matthew Carter and typography in the most recent issue of The New Yorker (5 Dec 2005). He is said to be the most significant type designer in America. He is British, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of his work includes the type for the ATT phone book and for many magazines and newspapers (he's currently working on a new typeface for Le Monde). He also designed Verdana for Microsoft. He originally learned typography by carving type out of steel in the Netherlands in the 1950s:
"With a needle, a type cutter scratched the outline of a letter on the end of a then shaft of steel called a punch. Then he began scraping steel away from the borders of the letter. 'It's a subtracting exercise. You remove the steel, and the letter is what's left.'" "Twenty years ago, Carter began drawing letters on a computer. He prefers to start with the lowercase 'h' and 'o'. He proceeds carefully, because any misjudgment multiplies its effect as he continues. He does 'p' and 'd' next, because they include elements of the 'h' and 'o' and are also inversions of each other. 'If something looks awful with your 'p' and 'd' ', he says, 'you know something's wrong with your 'h' and 'o', and you revise them.' Next he might draw a 'v', because it involves new considerations. 'You get half a dozen letters, and you work on them again and again until you feel confident,' he says. When he has collected enough letters to feel that his decisions are sound, he begins printing proofs of them in combinations -- 'ab', 'ac', 'ad', and so on." " 'The heavy lifting begins when the alphabet is finished,' Carter says. 'I begin then to see how the letters go together to make words, how they line up next to each other, how they sit on the page or the screen, how they work with the punctuation and the symbols. I print up forty or so pages, and when I first see them I feel suicidal. Nothing is working. If it isn't working, I don't necessarily know why it isn't. It simply looks bad. Then starts the long process of going back and making changes here and there. You change something one day, and the next day you change it back, because you realize it wasn't the problem. Nothing gets better, you despair, until one day you're looking -- you've changed something small -- and you're looking at a typeface.' " "Microsoft wanted its new typeface to be as legible as possible. Carter was aware as he worked that the point might soon be reached where more text was read on computer screens than was read on paper, and that the purpose in designing this face was not simply that it print handsomely but that it also looks good on the screen. "On a computer screen, Carter would display writing set in his design, and, on another screen beside it, he'd display the same words set in Microsoft's face MS Sans. Then he would back up slowly until he could no longer read one or the other. 'It's a crude way of doing it,' he says, 'but it works. If you degrade it, you learn.' " Greg
