Matthew Carter

Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter in 2014
Born	(1937-10-01) October 1, 1937 (age 79) London, England
Nationality	British
Known for	Typographic design
Awards	2010 MacArthur Fellow

Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.

Carter's career began in the early 1960s and has bridged all three major technologies used in type design: physical type, phototypesetting and digital font design, as well as the design of custom lettering.

Carter's most used fonts are the classic web fonts Verdana and Georgia and the Windows interface font Tahoma, as well as other designs including Bell Centennial, Miller and Galliard. He is the son of the English historian of printing Harry Carter (1901–1982) and cofounded Bitstream, one of the first major retailers of digital fonts. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Carter grew up in London, the son of Harry Carter, a book designer and later historian of printing. His mother worked in preparing scale drawings.

Although Carter had intended to get a degree in English at Oxford he was advised to take a year off so he would be the same age as his contemporaries who had gone into National Service.

Through his father, Carter arranged to hold an internship at the Joh. Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands for a year. An extremely long-lasting company with a long history of printing, Enschedé had a history of creating conservative but popular book typefaces. Carter studied manual punchcutting, the method used to make moulds used to cast metal type, under P. H. Raedisch. Punchcutting was a traditional artisanal approach in decline many years before the 1950s. Carter is one of the last people in Europe formally trained in the technique as a living practice.