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1995 AIGA MEDAL
With head bent and fingers delicately posed with
his graver, Matthew Carter is gazing through a lens with the cool
intensity of an accomplished surgeon. But because he is wearing a
suit and tie and his hair is carefully combed, one senses that this
is not an offhand snapshot, but a rigorously composed portrait of
the artist as a young man. The image graces the cover of a 1959
typographic journal called The New Mechanick Exercises. In
an essay on what was even then a vanishing art, Carter is
shown—deliberately, devotedly, anachronistically—punchcutting. The
article speculates that Carter would “eventually achieve the same
renown as Eric Gill.”
Carter's life has the contours of a manifest destiny toward
typography. His father, Harry Carter, was a respected typographer
and authority on the history of type-founding and punchcutting
techniques. At the age of 20, fresh out of school, Matthew spent a
year learning to cut punches by hand through an internship program
at the famous Enschedé printing house in Haarlem. Having passed his
exams to begin at Oxford, he realized he couldn't face three years
at university after having tasted a year out in the world. He had
“vaguely bookish plans” to pursue at Oxford, but was not excited by
the prospect of studying there: “English at Oxford was all
Beowoulf, nothing modern.” Expecting his father to contest his
decision, Matthew was surprised to find him very supportive. A
distinguished typophile, Harry Carter introduced his son to
important people and helped set him on his chosen path.
Carter has the privilege of having retraced the technological
development of typography in the course of his own training. After
his immersion at Enschedé, he spent six years as a freelance type
and lettering designer in London. He then moved into
phototypesetting technology as a typographical adviser to Crosfield
Eletronics. In 1965 he decided to move to the United States to take
a position at Mergenthaler Linotype in New York, where he designed
Snell Roundhand, Helvetica Compressed, and Greek and Korean faces,
among others. Six years later, Carter crossed the Atlantic again,
returning to London but preserving his link with Linotype. He
designed Balliard, the font that is perhaps most closely identified
with his name, during this period, as well as Bell Centennial, a
beautiful space-saving font created for use in American telephone
directories. Alongside these classics, he created Hebrew, Greek and
Devanagari fonts, as well as Shelley Script. Crowning,
metaphorically but also somewhat literally, the prolific period,
Carter was named Typographical Adviser to Her Majesty's Stationery
Office, the British government printer, from 1980 to 1984, and was
elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 1982. In the midst of the
professional recognition, Carter became interested in the
entrepreneurial implications of the digital type revolution. In
1981 he was one of four cofounders of Bitstream Inc., a digital
type foundry based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bitstream was among
the first of the independent font foundries. More than a decade
later, two of the founding partners, Carter and Cherie Cone,
established a new, smaller company called Carter Cone Type Inc.
With the diminution in scale and staff, Carter was relieved of some
of the administrative and financial burdens to be found in larger
organizations.
Carter's typographic achievements over the last five years have
proven the wisdom of his move into smaller quarters: some of his
finest works—the fonts Elephant, Mantinia, Sophia, Big Caslon,
Alisal and Walker—were created during this period. While many of
Carter's typefaces have responded to pragmatically defined needs,
the Carter & Cone fonts have tended to be of a more speculative
nature, pursued as inspiration struck. Mantinia, for example, is
based on the lettering that mesmerized Carter when he saw a major
retrospective of Andrea Mantegna's work: “I think he is the best
letterer of any painter. I had this feeling that, historically
speaking, Mantegna had been very important in opening people's eyes
to the beauty of the classical letterforms.” Another font that
responds to a historical precedent is Sophia, based on the highly
mixed lettering found in Constantinople around the sixth century,
when that area of the world was extremely cosmopolitan. In
designing Sophia, an important resource for Carter was a silver
chalice from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston whose lettering
provided a particularly interesting example of his hybrid
style.
Carter's reputation is one built on both good type and good
words: his contributions to the formal vocabulary of typography
must be seen against the backdrop of his intellectual gifts. He is
an articulate commentator on typography, an amused observer of its
public life, sprinkling lectures with puns and aphorisms that
betray the life of a mind obsessed with type (e.g., “movable type
is now mutable type.”). What is obvious, in the visual evidence of
his type design as well as in his lectures and writings, is a
generosity of spirit, a constantly calibrated measure of restraint
and flourish in his visual and verbal talents.
His thoughts on design are not worn with the armor-plated
sureness of the veteran practitioner: he is instead perceptive,
fluid and gracious in the face of the enormous changes that have
swept typographic technology in the last 40 years. He does not
offer a creed or a manifesto, but has rather issued kernels of
wisdom, warning against the orthodoxies of technological
determinism, or overarching theories of truth-to-materials in type
design. When he states that “technology changes faster than
design,” he is arguing, gently, for the preservation of typographic
ideals; when he says he is “not an absolutist,” he is advocating
tolerance of the experimentation of younger type designers. Not
only does Carter welcome graphic designers who are undertaking
their own type design, he is excited by the radical democratization
of type made possible by the personal computer. He is not, however,
an uncritical pluralist. In response to the recent flood of
typographic activity, he says, in characteristic understatement,
“The results are not always wonderful, but you cannot champion the
demystification of something and then protest that the results are
mystifying!”
Within Carter's oeuvre there is no sense of a recurrent
aesthetic. He has been a problem solver (Snell Roundhand, Bell
Centennial), a historian (Big Caslon), a synthesizer (Sophia), and
a radical (Walker). He designed Snell Roundhand not because he has
a fondness for scripts, but because photo-composing machines made
joining scripts possible. Thus his influential design of Snell was
a celebration of a kind of technical liberation from the
constraints of metal typecasting rather than the pursuit of a
particular aesthetic. The font Walker, commissioned by the Walker
Art Center in 1994, features an unprecedented kind of “snap-on”
serif, accessed through alternative keystrokes. The interest in a
sans serif with optional serifs grew organically out of discussions
with the design staff of the Walker Art Center. It was only
afterward that Carter remembered that a functional model for Walker
existed in his solution for photo-setting accents in Greek fonts.
His solution in the Greek font was to drop the accent on top of a
letter with a zero-space key before hitting another character hat
would advance a letter-space. This method of building composite
characters in Greek photo lettering is also used in Walker to build
serif characters and linking strokes. Walker's kit-of-parts
sensibility represents a paradigm shift in type design that is sure
to be influential.
Carter sees two tendencies in type designers: those who have a
strong visual personality, and those whose work does not elaborate
a signature aesthetic. Carter offered Goudy, Hermann Zapf and
Gerard Unger as examples of designers whose work he admires for its
singularity of vision. Carter vividly described their fonts as
having “residual, skeletal forms.” He sees himself, however, as
coming from a different position, attributable to his background in
type-founding rather than art or design school. While there may be
no recurrent structure from one of Carter's fonts to the next,
there is certainly a great deal of structure particular to each
one. One of Carter's favorite assessments of his work asserts that
the letters he draws have “backbones.” This sturdiness of structure
is evidence of an analytical rigor that his fonts, writing, and
speaking share. His typefaces have the precision, conviction, and
distinction of a well-thought argument or clear diction.
When Carter says, “I can't think of a period in typography that
I would rather be working in,” one realizes that he has grasped the
implications of his own talent in its intersection with history.
When asked what sustains his interest in typography, he offers
this: “A font is always a struggle between the alphabetic nature of
the letterform, the 'A-ness' of the A, and your desire to put some
of yourself into the letterform. It's a struggle between
representing something (you cannot take endless liberties with a
letterform) and trying to find some iota of yourself in it.” With
characteristic modesty, Carter speaks of finding oneself in the
letter as opposed to merely putting oneself in it. The statement is
a beautiful evocation of the tension between expression and
restraint that animates the work of Matthew Carter.
Copyright 1997 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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