Codex 99 is set entirely in Matthew Carter’s Georgia.1
1. In 1955, Matthew Carter, then 19, needed a job to tide him over a year before beginning his studies at Oxford. His father, the typographer and type historian Harry Carter, helped him obtain an internship with the Joh. Enschedé type foundry in the Netherlands. Under P. H. Raedisch, Jan van Krimpen’s assistant, he learned the dying art of punch-cutting. Carter never made it to Oxford, instead, as he later stated: “I’ve been serving a life sentence in type ever since.” Briefly: after freelancing for several years, Carter joined Crosfield Electronics and designed type for the Lumitype/Photon. In 1965 he moved to New York to work for Mergenthaler Linotype and was their house designer for the next 15 years. In 1981, along with several other Linotype designers, he founded Bitstream, the first independent digital foundry. Finally, in 1991, along with Cherie Cone, he founded Carter & Cone Type.
Perhaps because of his technical training he viewed his work as pragmatic solutions to specific design problems rather than a purely aesthetic exercise. E.g, Snell Roundhand (1972) showed the possibilities of phototypesetting, Bell Centennial (1977) was a solution to printing small point sizes on cheap paper, and Bitstream Charter (1987) a solution to low-resolution printing, etc.
In the mid-1990s Virginia Howlett, Microsoft’s Program Manager for Typography, commissioned Carter to design a series of typefaces for the nascent Microsoft Network that were clearly legible on low-resolution displays. The first, Verdana, released on 8 Jul 1996, was a san-serif face that soon became the most popular typeface on the internet. After Verdana, Carter began working on a serifed counterpart. He based the new typeface on Scotch Roman, but with an increased x-height, wider and blunter serifs, opened counters (but closer letter spacing), and a set of old-style figures. Carter took the unusual approach of designing the bitmaps at various point sizes first, then wrapping them in a true-type outline. As he later stated: “In the past I've been burned starting from outlines and trying to be extra clever in the hinting. So I finally decided I'm better off grasping the nettle. What’s most important is to get the bitmaps right at the sizes people use most often.” The outlines were then hand-hinted by Tom Rickner of Afga-Monotype. The result, named Georgia (after a tabloid headline “Alien heads found in Georgia.”), was released on 1 Nov 1996.
After some five years of Verdana dominance on the internet, Georgia underwent something of a revival, particularly on weblogs, although, according to Carter “It seems a bit young to have died and been revived already.” Finally, in Sep 2009, the Ascender Corp. and Microsoft announced that Carter and Rickner would prepare extensions to the Georgia (and Verdana) family, including new weights, expanded character sets and updated kerning.
22 Jan 2012 ‧ Administrativa