The most-read man in the world

By G.F. | SEATTLE

MATTHEW CARTER, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. "Have we met?" Mr Carter asked. No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. "Is your daughter a graphic designer?" he inquired. "She's in sixth grade," came the reply.

Mr Carter sits near the pinnacle of an elite profession. No more than several thousand type designers ply the trade worldwide, only a few hundred earn their keep by it, and only several dozens—most of them dead—have their names on the lips of discerning aficionados. Then, there is Mr Carter. He has never sought recognition, but it found him, and his underappreciated craft, in part thanks to a "New Yorker" profile in 2005. Now, even schoolchildren (albeit discerning ones) seem to know who he is and what he does. However, the reason is probably not so much the beauty and utility of his faces, both of which are almost universally acknowledged. Rather, it is Georgia and Verdana. Mr Carter conjured up both fonts in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with its Internet Explorer in the late 1990s and bundled them into Windows, before disseminating them as a free download.

Most fonts in use at the time were either adapted from type designed for print, or were created primarily for user interface elements. Georgia and Verdana were designed from scratch with monitor legibility in mind. But then, Mr Carter, now 73, has always been a man ahead of the times. For each successive technological revolution in type, he was among the first to create popularly used faces. An early creator and adapter of phototype designs, he worked with some of the first practical digital typesetting. These computer-driven systems lacked the horsepower to turn curves into bitmapped output. Instead, type was built on grid paper, pixel by pixel. Mr Carter designed Bell Centennial, a replacement for AT&T's 40-year-old phone-book font, in just such a fashion. The result was a more compact type that used vastly less paper.

And yet, in another respect, he has always been behind the times. During a teenage stint in the Netherlands, he trained with an eccentric designer to cut typefaces by hand, a process that involves working at two or three removes from the final cast-metal product. Such training was unusual even at the turn of the 20th century, when machine-aided cutting was the norm, but Mr Carter counts it as invaluable. "If I were born 10 or 15 years later, I could not have had some of my experience I had with metal type," he recalls fondly.

This respect for history is one reason he suspects that the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a 2010 fellowship, despite most fellows' average age being around 40. While the group never reveals its precise criteria, Mr Carter's citation included a mention of him having survived through a number of changes of technology. "Of course, it would have been hard for someone to do that if they weren't approximately my age," he quips.

The foundation made a wise choice. Having already created seminal faces read and seen by hundreds of millions of people each day on screen, in phone books and wherever else letters appear, he has no desire to slow down. Last year, Mr Carter designed a new face to be cut as wood type for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

At the recent Type Americana conference in Seattle, which this Babbage attended, the project was described in a lecture by Jim and Bill Moran; the former is the museum's director and the latter deeply involved in projects there. As usual with Mr Carter, old and new both played a part. Success came when the hand-driven pantograph cutters were replaced with computer numerical control (CNC) wood routers. Naturally, the type is also available in digital form. Last year, it was finally cut and used at a Wayzgoose, a traditional printers' cotillion.

Despite his types' ubiquity and his position in the field, Mr Carter remains as surprised as anyone about the preponderance of his Microsoft fonts. He anticipated a flood of specially designed Web faces would soon drown out his creations which were, after all, a product of an earlier technological generation. But Georgia and Verdana became embossed in the internet's visual culture. So much so that Mr Carter regularly hears people carp about a lack of alternatives.

These may emerge with the advent of electronic book readers, for which Mr Carter has yet to tailor a font. For now, Amazon's Kindle uses a single face from another designer for its dedicated reader and software versions, while Barnes & Noble's Nook reader offers three non-Carter choices. (Apple's Nook app does include a Georgia option, and three of Mr Carter's faces are available in the iBooks app for the iPhone and iPad.)

In fact, Mr Carter doesn't own an iPad, Kindle, or other reading device, as he is waiting for them to mature. (He does own an iPhone.) He frets that, as things stand, reading devices and programs homogenise all the tangible aspects of a book, like size or shape, as well as font. They are also poor at hyphenation and justification: breaking words at lexically appropriate locations, and varying the spacing between letters and between words. This may sound recondite but it is a visual imprint of principles established over the entire written history of a language. "Maybe people who grow up reading online, where every book is identical, don't know what they're missing."

Now, Mr Carter is looking for his next challenge, spurred by the award of the fellowship, not to mention the accompanying cheque for $500,000. Most of his recent work was bespoke for Carter & Cone Type, the firm he operates with his partner Cherie Cone. His last personal endeavour, a set of 15 display and text faces called Miller, has become the single biggest royalty source among fonts to which he controls rights. Finding a suitably ambitious project is no mean feat for a man with Mr Carter's resumé. But we probably won't have to wait long before the multifaceted craftsman shows us yet another new face.