He is one of those lettering artists who learned the craft right at the time when it was becoming obsolete. While passionate about calligraphy and sign painting, he loves working with digital design tools. He has drawn custom logos and titles for prestigious companies. He has produced a string of successful font families, of which the most recent — Desire — took him an estimated 7,000 working hours. He was a mentor to fellow lettering artists Laura Worthington and Debi Sementelli, both of whom he helped to perfect their digital skills. Meet Charles Borges de Oliveira from Borges Lettering, building bridges between hand crafts and digital savvy.
He’s arguably the most widely read type designer in the world. Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma, Skia: all ubiquitous, all his. Miller, one of North America’s most popular news faces — his initiative. Bell Centennial, drawn for AT&T, has been used in millions of phone books. His typefaces are all across the stylistic spectrum, from elegant renaissance oldstyles via meticulous scripts to indestructible sans-serifs. Having started as an apprentice at age 19, he has been in the business for the best part of six decades and is still passionately interested in the latest technological developments. He revels in working with demanding technicians and challenging projects. Here is our long-awaited interview with Matthew Carter.
He is not one of those type designers who produces a new font family every two or three months. Each of his typefaces has taken considerable time to mature, and it shows: they are thoughtful, original and well-wrought. Rather than responding to passing trends, his Emtype Foundry publishes fonts that are aimed at having a long shelf-life, and his Geogrotesque has been a bestseller ever since it came out five years ago. He is also prepared to pull his weight when it comes to nourishing international typographic culture — he’ll be co-organizer of next year’s ATypI conference, the world’s major annual get-together of type designers. Meet Eduardo Manso, an Argentinian who has made Barcelona his home.
Based in Santiago, Chile, Latinotype has been one of the most successful foundries on MyFonts in recent years. Their type library is a rapidly growing collection of typefaces in a wide array of genres. They specialize in colorful display and script faces, but have recently focused on sophisticated text faces as well. The foundry is owned and managed by a trio of type designers, two of whom have the same family name but are unrelated: Miguel Hernández, Luciano Vergara and Daniel Hernández. Yet Latinotype has worked with about a dozen talented, young designers and hopes to welcome more. Meet three of the most productive type designers in Latin America.
He is one of those rather modest designers who let their work speak for itself. He is not on every student’s list of “great names in type design.” Yet he has been in the business of making letters – be it with a brush, a pen, or a computer mouse – for decades, and has worked for some of the most innovative type companies, including Bitstream and Adobe. Now he is a staff designer at Boston’s Font Bureau, and as productive as ever. Meet Richard Lipton, a master of many scripts.