show summary: Matthew Carter is both a master and a slave to the alphabet. For more than 40 years he has designed the letters for everything from Sports Illustrated magazine, The Boston Globe, Ma Bell's phone book, to the font menu on your computer. Carter's creations read like a "Who's Who" of fonts.
He's the artist behind names like Verdana, Helvetica Compressed, Miller, and Snell Roundhand. He shapes and crafts something that he calls "word space." People read, Carter says, not by seeing individual letters, but by recognizing figures. And so those figures have to be easy to discern, possessing both integrity and synchronicity so they can link seamlessly into usable blocks of text. From the days of the steel punch to the Pentium 4 chip, we look at Matthew Carter's Life of Letters
-------------------- Alan Dearborn Dearborn Graphics Hampton, NH USA Posts: 271 | From: NH USA | Registered: Mar 2000
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Alan, thanks for the link. Typography has always interested me. When I was a little kid, I would spend time looking at headline type in magazines and then try to reproduce the lettering. Always lettering. This is what got me into sign painting.
After I learned to letter to the point of being gainfully employed, I tried to make my lettering look like it was typeset... now I am making my digital lettering look hand done!
If you or anyone here is interested in old hand lettered commercial type, Mac MacQuarrie ( MacQuarrie Studios, 192 Casitas Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127-1602) publishes an interesting little newsletter several times a year.
Curt Stenz
-------------------- Curt Stenz Graphics 700 Squirrel Lane Marathon, WI 54448 Posts: 595 | From: Marathon, WI 54448 | Registered: Dec 1998
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