Matthew Carter: My life in typefaces
March 2014
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Quotes:
Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.
Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods.
The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever?
I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper --there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size.
David Carson
February 2003
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Quotes:
I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read,before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting -- whatever it is. That area of design interests me the most, and I think this for me is a real clear, very simplified version of what I'm talking about. These are a couple of garage doors painted identical, situated next to each other. So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message. You know, it's pretty clear. Take a look at the second door and see if there's any different message. O.K., which one would you park in front of? Same colour, same message, same words. The only thing that's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece -- and, again, which is the psycho-killer here? Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that. I would probably park in front of the other one.
I'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so. It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive.
I did some work for Microsoft a few years back. It was a worldwide branding campaign. And it was interesting to me -- my background is in sociology; I had no design training, and sometimes people say, well, that explains it -- but it was a very interesting experiment because there's no product that I had to sell; it was simply the image of Microsoft they were trying to improve. They thought some people didn't like them. I found out that's very true, working on this campaign worldwide. And our goal was to try to humanise them a bit, and what I did was add type and people to the ad, which the previous campaign had not had, and nobody remembered them, and nobody referenced them. And we were trying to say that, hey, some of these guys that work there are actually OK; some of them actually have friends and family, and they're not all awful people. And the umbrella campaign was "Thank God it's Monday." So, we tried to take this -- what was perceived as a negative: their over-competitiveness, their, you know, long working hours -- and turn it into a positive and not run from it. You know: Thank God it's Monday -- I get to go back to that little cubicle, those fake grey walls, and hear everybody else's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home.
What's next? What's next is going to be people. As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience. If you allow that to happen, it's really the only way you can do some unique work,and you're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well.
Why not experiment? Why not have some fun? Why not put some of yourself into the work?
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