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Tag: matthew carter

Matthew Carter: My life in typefaces

matthew-carter-TED
Type designer Matthew Carter, creator of typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial, talks about his career, working within constraints, and the connection between technology and type for TED Talks:

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Midweek Miscellany

Little Nemo meets David Lynch — Mark Medley interviews Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and X’ed Out , for The National Post:

Whereas Black Hole, which takes place in the early 1970s, examines the dread and confusion of adolescence using the tropes of a horror film, X’ed Out, which is set in the late 1970s at the height of punk music, is an exploration of young adulthood and the anger, uncertainty and experimentation that comes with aging.

“I definitely started out wanting to do my punk story,” says Burns, 55. “As typically happens, you start with one idea and it spreads.”

A House Full of BooksThe LA Times book critic David L. Ulin on the gift of books:

We have a rule in our house: My wife and I will always pony up for books. It’s not even a subject of discussion — if either of our kids wants a book, we will buy it, no questions asked. This is equally true of the books we have at home, which are equally available to everyone, regardless of subject matter or degree of difficulty. Whatever else they are, after all, books are gifts (for the mind, the eye, the hand), which makes it downright uncharitable to deny them to anyone.

This, I should say, is how I was raised too, in a house full of books, by parents who put a premium on the written word. I was allowed to pick up everything — and often did. When I was in third grade, I checked out “War and Peace” from the school library (I was looking for the longest book in the world), and although I never actually opened it, I remain thrilled by the idea that no one told me not to try.

Don’t Know What They’re MissingThe Economist profiles type designer Matthew Carter:

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.”

On a sort of related note… Mashable talks to designer Susan Kare about her icon designs for the original Apple Macs.

And finally (as we’re talking about typography)…

Jean-Luc — A free display typeface in two styles designed by Atelier Carvalho Bernau to celebrate Jean-Luc Godard’s 80th birthday.

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Midweek Miscellany

Lost Libraries — With the personal book collection of David Markson ending up at The Strand bookstore in New York, Craig Fehrman examines the fate authors’ libraries for The Boston Globe (via The Second Pass):

Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter — that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved. In fact, David Markson can now take his place in a long and distinguished line of writers whose personal libraries were quickly, casually broken down. Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa.

Fehrman expands on this article — and the reasons we should not have been surprised that Markson’s books found their way to The Strand — at his blog.

Eating Each Other is Wrong — Evan Scnittman, Managing and Director of Sales and Marketing at Bloomsbury, argues that e-books don’t cannibalize print:

The most important lesson I can convey to book publishing professionals is that they must understand that those of us who have made the transition to ebooks, buy ebooks, not print books. Ebook reading device users don’t shop in bookstores and then decide what edition they want; ebook device readers buy what is available in ebookstores. Search an ebookstore for a title and if it doesn’t come up, it doesn’t exist – no matter how many versions are available in print.

Ebooks aren’t a better value, ebooks aren’t more attractive nor are they a threat to the print version of any immersive reading book. This isn’t the same as paperback versions vs hardcover – where the platform and convenience are the same – the timing and pricing are the key ingredients. Books that aren’t in ebook form are do not exist to ebook reading consumers. There is no cannibalization if in the mind of the buyer if there is no version available to them.

The Forgotten Mimics — In the 11th installment of The National Post’s ‘Ecology of Books’ series, Mark Medley talks to to some of Canada’s foremost literary translators:

“We’re not robots,” says [Lazer] Lederhendler, 59, who won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his translation of Dickner’s last novel, Nikolski. “We have a way of reading a book. We have a way of using the language. We have our own vocabulary, our likes and dislikes in terms of this phrase or that phrase. It’s a kind of balancing act between observing the fact that you’re at the service of someone else’s work, but at the same time it’s an artistic mission.”

Four Decades of Art — A mini-documentary about illustration in The New York Times Op-Ed page, featuring interviews with art directors and illustrators.

And finally…

Type designer Matthew Carter and writer David Simon (creator of The Wire) were recently named MacArthur Fellows. The Fellowship is a $500,000 (US), no-strings-attached grant for people who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and promise to do more (via How Magazine):

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Midweek Miscellany

Mambo for Fonts — Flora Mambo is a new font from the P22 Type Foundry based on Jim Flora’s hand-lettering for the 1955 Mambo For Cats RCA Victor album cover.

Character — Type designer Matthew Carter profiled in The Boston Globe:

Around 1994, he started developing Verdana, a revolutionary font for having prevailed over technical constraints of that time, like coarse computer screen resolution. To hear Carter recall it, it was a pivotal moment: People were on the brink of reading as much — or more — on screen than on paper. And that transition has had a profound effect on the design process.

Carter also talks about his work in this short video for the Globe (via Eightface):


The Paris Review has made it’s entire interview archive — from the 1950’s to the present — available online (via The NY Observer).

An Education — James Bridle of BookTwo and Bookkake interviewed at Publishing Perspectives:

“There’s still a reluctance in the industry to give [e-books] their own space. They are still subsidiary to the traditional book forms… There still an incredible lack of understanding about them and the people who are doing the educating are Apple and Amazon, which means they are taking the market very quickly and we’re kind of letting them do that.”

The Likely Lads — Authors Lee Rourke (Canal) and Tom McCarthy (Remainder, C) in conversation at The Guardian.

And finally…

Writers from The Guardian and Observer newspapers talk about the books that sparked their passion for literature:

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