Talk:
The Designer’s Role
with Matthew Carter
I was commissioned by Morisawa, the Japanese type company, to design Role, a family of Latin types, in collaboration with three Japanese designers: Sakura Taruno, Shotaro Nakano, and Kunihiko Okano. The project was an opportunity for designers trained in Kanji and Kana to take on an ambitious Latin superfamily of serif, sans, slab and rounded, in a wide range of weights and at three optically-scaled sizes. For me, I learned that there are fundamental aspects to type design that are independent of writing system, and that many of the skills my Japanese fellow designers brought with them were transferable across typographic cultures. Specimen booklets, the first showings of Role, are available at this conference.
This talk is scheduled as part of the main Typographics conference schedule. You must register for the Typographics conference to attend.
About Matthew Carter
Matthew Carter is a type designer with 60 years’ experience in typographic technologies, ranging from hand-cut punches to computer fonts. After a long association with the Linotype companies he was a co-founder of Bitstream Inc. in 1981, a digital type foundry where he worked for ten years. Carter is now a principal of Carter & Cone Type Inc., designers and producers of original typefaces, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Carter’s type designs include ITC Galliard, Snell Roundhand and Shelley scripts, Helvetica Compressed, Olympian, Bell Centennial, ITC Charter, Mantinia, Sophia, Big Caslon, Big Moore, Miller, Roster, Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Sitka and Carter Sans.
