Mike Parker (typographer)
| Mike Russell Parker | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1929 (age 87–88) London |
| Died | February 23, 2014 Portland, Maine |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Typographer and type designer |
| Known for | Directing Mergenthaler Linotype Company; founding Bitstream Inc. |
Mike Russell Parker (1929 - February 23, 2014) was a British-born American typographer and type designer.
Parker is known for rediscovering a "nameless Roman" type font and preparing it as a Starling series for Font Bureau.
Parker was born in London in 1929, the son of a geologist. He had intended to follow his father into the profession, but was prevented from doing do due to colorblindness. He attended Yale University. He graduated with a degree in architecture and a master's in design. He then worked at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.
Parker joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as Jackson Burke's assistant and heir; within two years becoming Director. Under Parker's leadership over 1,000 typefaces, including Helvetica, were added to the library making them available wherever Linotype equipment was in use, including complete series of Hebrew and Greek scripts. This was made possible through Parker’s organization of shared typeface development between the five separate companies in the Linotype Group worldwide. Parker was responsible for bringing in internationally known designers such as Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf. The result was a library that became the standard of the industry.
In 1981, Parker and Matthew Carter co-founded Bitstream Inc, a type design company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While revenues from the sale of typesetting equipment were dwindling, they recognized a business opportunity in the design and sale of type itself, due to the changing technologies that allowed type to be independent of equipment. Bitstream, largely financed through prepayment for the type library by several newly formed imagesetting companies, developed a library of digital type that could be licensed for use by anyone. Bitstream was highly successful during the 1980s when digital design and production, desktop publishing and personal computer use became virtually universal in the Western World.
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