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
Guests:
Matthew Carter, one of the world’s preeminent typeface designers. His fonts are used in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, and starting this month, the redesigned BusinessWeek Magazine.