Meet Matthew Carter's Newest Typeface: Carter Sans
Press Release
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has introduced into its ITC collection the latest typeface by the master typeface designer, Matthew Carter. The eight-font Carter Sans family can be licensed and downloaded from Monotype Imaging’s Fonts.com, ITCFonts.com, and Linotype.com stores. Carter Sans is also available for website design from Fonts.com Web Fonts.
“We approached Matthew, one of the world’s most accomplished type designers, to head the design of a new sans serif family for our ITC library,” said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. “The result is Carter Sans – an exceptionally beautiful design that reflects a spirit of distinction and authenticity, perfectly suited to our ITC collection.”
Carter Sans is a “sans serif with stroke endings that show the effect of the chisel more than the pen,” according to Carter. He was inspired by the work of his friend, the late Berthold Wolpe, and integrated the humanistic overtones, hearty shapes and the bold simplicity of Wolpe’s Albertus typeface, which Wolpe completed for Monotype in 1940, modeling characters to resemble letters carved into bronze. While designing Carter Sans, Carter collaborated with Dan Reynolds, a senior type designer at Monotype Imaging’s Linotype subsidiary. Reynolds oversaw character set development and font production and also designed the small caps to complement Carter’s old style figures. “Carter Sans is ideally suited for display copy as well as text composition, thanks to the close collaboration between Matthew and Dan,” Haley said.
Carter’s career has spanned decades, encompassing the evolvement of type from the printed page to the screen. He has embraced every form of type creation, first as a punch cutter, handcrafting letterforms in metal as a teenager. Moving into modern techniques as they became available, Carter has designed fonts that generate text using phototypesetting machines, desktop computers and now consumer electronics devices. He has created more than 60 typeface families and over 250 individual fonts, ranging from script designs such as the Snell Roundhand, Cascade and Shelley fonts to modern classics including the ITC Charter, ITC Galliard and Olympian faces. Carter’s work also comprises widely used fonts such as the Tahoma, Verdana and Georgia families that are part of the Microsoft Windows platform. In addition, he has designed custom typefaces for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Wired, Newsweek and Time, and clients such as AT&T, which commissioned Carter in the 1980s to create a highly readable, space-saving font for phone books. Recently, Carter was honored as a MacArthur Fellow for 2010 and was also inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. Today, Carter and Cherie Cone run Carter and Cone Type, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., which produces and markets Carter’s designs.
Availability
Carter Sans fonts, selection packs and typeface families can be viewed, purchased and downloaded from Monotype Imaging’s Fonts.com, ITCFonts.com, and Linotype.com stores.
Carter Sans is based on the OpenType cross-platform format and comprises eight weights, including regular, medium, semibold and bold, each with corresponding italics. OpenType Pro fonts, which support OpenType capabilities such as the automatic insertion of ligatures and alternate characters, offer an extended character set to support most Central European and several Eastern European languages.
Carter Sans is also available for website design to commercial subscribers of Fonts.com Web Fonts.
Customers may contact Monotype Imaging in the U.S. toll-free at 800-424-8973, or in Europe at (+44 0)1737 765959, or 001781 970-6020, option 2. Linotype may be reached at +49 (0) 6172 484-418. Customers from other parts of the world may dial 001 781 970-6020 (U.S.).
