Born 1937, son of Harry Carter (1901–1982), who was also a type designer.

After graduating from secondary school and before beginning his college education at Oxford, he took an internship at the Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands. The plan was for him to rotate through the departments in the company and acquire a basic overview of the printing and type founding business. Instead, Carter arrived at the punchcutting department and stayed, learning this craft from one of its masters, P. H. Rädish.

Matthew Carter is a type designer with more than forty years’ experience of typographic technologies ranging from hand-cut punches to computer fonts. After a long association with the Linotype companies he was a co-founder in 1981 of Bitstream Inc., the digital type foundry, where he worked for ten years. He is now a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designers and producers of original typefaces.

His type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian (for newspaper text), Bell Centennial (for the U.S. telephone directories), ITC Charter, and faces for Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Devanagari, an alphabet used in India. For Carter & Cone he has designed Mantinia, Sophia, Elephant, Big Caslon, Alisal, and Miller.

Carter & Cone have produced types on commission for Apple Computer, Inc., Microsoft (the screen fonts Verdana and Georgia), Time Magazine, Newsweek, Wired, U.S. News & World Report, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and the Walker Art Center.

Carter speaks frequently at conferences, colleges, and chapters of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts).

Carter is a Royal Designer for Industry, a member of AGI, and chairman of the type designers’ committee of ATypI. He has received the Frederic W. Goudy Award for outstanding contribution to the printing industry, the Middleton Award from the American Center for Design, a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the AIGA medal, and the Type Directors Club medal. He holds the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Bell Centennial, Cascade Script, Bitstream Charter, ITC Galliard, Georgia, Olympian, Mantinia, Miller, Shelley Script, Snell Roundhand, Skia, Sophia, Tahoma, Verdana, Nina, Meiryo

Carter & Cone

Type Directors Club: Former director
Introducing the YALE typeface
DT&G interview: Father of the font you are now reading
Font Haus: An Interview with Matthew Carter
Channel Verdana
Design Museum British Council

Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter