You are the son of Harry Carter, one of the major British historians of typography of the last century. To what extent did this influence your early career?

My father was both an academic and a practicing typographer. Around the time I was born, in 1937, he worked for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office and for the Nonesuch Press. Around 1953, he was hired by the University Press at Oxford with the title of archivist, which meant that he was supposed to look after the historical material there, and research the history of type. History was his first love. But I think one reason why he was such a good historian was the fact that he had designed books, had cut punches, and studied typefounding. His historical knowledge was informed by very practical expertise.

At 18, I passed my exams to study English in Oxford. However, when I left school I could not start university immediately. Until the mid-1950s, boys did two years of military service before starting University. As the draft system was coming to an end, I was among the first that did not have go into the army. But the Oxford college that had accepted me was used to students being two years older, and they did not want me right away. They said: we’ll split the difference, go do something else for a year. So in 1955 my parents had to think of something to keep me occupied.

As my father had very friendly relationships with Jan van Krimpen and the Enschedé printing company, it was arranged that I would spend that year in Haarlem in the Netherlands as an unpaid trainee. As you know, Enschedé was a very interesting company; they did all the security printing such as passports, stamps and stock certificates, as well as book printing, high quality color work and so on. But there was also the Enschedé type foundry, which was the department where I happened to start my year. The idea was that I would work around all the different departments, but I got so interested that I spent virtually the whole year in the type foundry.

And that’s where you learned the ancient craft of punchcutting.

Indeed. Paul Rädisch, who had cut Jan van Krimpen’s types, was still there. But there was also a much younger man called Henk Drost, who had been trained by Rädisch. I sat between them, and I learned from both. It was Henk who became my main mentor.

A year is not long enough to become a skillful punchcutter, but I learned how it was done, and I had some proficiency. Enschedé was unique in having their own type foundry. Most printers got rid of their type foundries in previous centuries. And what I learned — to make type by hand — was completely obsolete as a profession.

So it’s rather curious — that year that was meant to be an interlude…

…determined the rest of your life.

Exactly. I was supposed to start my studies of medieval English, but I decided I couldn’t face it. I expected to face a problem at home, because my father was a real academic, and had studied at the same Oxford college that had accepted me. To my surprise and relief my parents were really understanding: “If you have become really interested in type and you want to pursue it, then that’s fine.” It was much easier than I’d expected.

And so I started to work by myself. It soon became obvious that I couldn’t make a living as a freelance punchcutter. I did a few engraving jobs for Monotype and others, but work of that kind was very rare. So when I moved to London in 1958–1959, I started doing lettering.

How did you get from there to designing printing types?

I was very fortunate. Around 1960 in London there was a small group of graphic designers who wanted to work in a non-traditional international style. They were familiar with contemporary work in Switzerland, in Japan, in the USA. But they faced a problem because the typesetting trade in London was incredibly conservative. Although Helvetica had come out in 1957, it was impossible to find Helvetica in London in 1961. So there was a growing demand for people who could draw lettering in a contemporary style for logos, book covers, and so on.

I started this business of designing lettering, which in those days meant of course hand-drawing the letters, copying them photographically, and then pasting up words. It was good training for me, because these were graphic designers who had very high standards and strong ideas about what they wanted. These were people like Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, who later became Pentagram, and David Collins. I did a whole Greek sans serif for Collins because Cyprus Airways was a client of his. Colin Forbes commissioned a signage alphabet for London Airport.

Then around 1963 I was hired by Crosfield Electronics in London, who were the British manufacturing agents for the Photon typesetting system, known in Europe as Lumitype. My task was to produce fonts for the Lumitype 540 series and in order to do that I had to spend about a week a month at Deberny & Peignot in Paris, because they made the font disks for Lumitype. This brought me in contact with Adrian Frutiger, who had his own studio but came into Deberny & Peignot about once a week. It was also my first direct experience with photo-composition, drawing type and organizing the manufacture of the fonts.

And then, in the mid-1960s, you moved to the United States.

At the beginning of the decade I had the opportunity to visit New York, and that trip opened my eyes in a most extraordinary way. People use the term “culture shock” very glibly nowadays, but this was a real shock to me. I had grown up in a sort of typographically privileged world in England and I was very cocky. I thought I knew everyone and everything. In a matter of days I realized I was completely ignorant. I visited the studios of Herb Lubalin and Milton Glaser. Also, the yearly show of the Type Directors Club happened to be up, and I saw type-based work that I had no idea about. To be honest, it scared me. On the same trip I met Mike Parker, who had recently begun working for Linotype in New York, and I visited him there.

I realized I had two choices. One was to go back to England and act as if it hadn’t happened. The other choice was to say to myself: this is where I have to be, this is where the game is played. And that’s what I did. I made it plain to Mike and to his boss Jackson Burke that I wanted to work at Linotype. There was no immediate opening, but a few years later Mike became director of typographic development. Mike and I had kept in close touch and later became great friends. So I moved to New York in September 1965 with the job of in-house type designer at Linotype.

You worked at Linotype for fifteen years, than started Bitstream with Mike Parker, and later became an independent designer. Throughout that amazing career, one of your specialties seems to have been to solve technical problems through type. I’d like to discuss a few of those typefaces. Can we start with Bell Centennial?

It was commissioned by AT&T. In the 1930s Linotype had done Bell Gothic for setting the phone books. By the mid-1970s, AT&T had started pioneering the use of very high-speed digital typesetting devices. Bell Gothic started showing big problems when set digitally and printed offset. So they came back to Linotype and said: we think it’s time to revisit the directory typeface. And I got the job.

AT&T set up a committee of various specialists to guide us. It was very well-funded and we did a lot of research both before going into digital form and afterwards. They were very cooperative about printing trials on the actual presses, so it was quite a long project and very exciting. From the outset it was destined to be digital. But there was no way of rasterizing type at that time. Nowadays I draw outlines, which get converted electronically into bitmaps for digital composition. At the time there was no computer program that would do that, so I did all that by hand. I would put my drawings on a piece of graph paper, draw in every pixel, and then encode them. For every raster line: turn on – off – etc… Essentially I hand-digitized each of the four faces in the Centennial family. It was my first experience of working digitally and it was enormously laborious, but I learned a great deal from doing that.

In lectures you’ve mentioned you would sometimes set out to solve a technical problem, and by the time the typeface was done the problem had disappeared.

That was the story of Charter, done in 1987 — a perfect parable of being one step behind. Charter began when I was at Bitstream, and there was an issue about the amount of data required to store fonts. A serif typeface took twice as much data as a sans, because of all the curves and extra points. So I started doing Charter with a very simplified structure and a minimum number of curves, more straight-line segments, etc. It was very economical compared to, say, Times New Roman. When finished, I proudly went to the head of engineering at Bitstream, but he said: oh, we don’t have a problem with that any longer, we now have more compact algorithms. I was left with a design solution to a nonexistent technical problem. But by that time I had gotten very interested in the idea of the simplified design. The technical raison d’etre had gone, but I persevered with it for completely different reasons, as I was now interested in the design for its own sake.

How about Georgia and Verdana?

Georgia and Verdana were designed at a time when screen resolution was not as good as it is now. It hasn’t advanced all that much, but the rendering has improved a lot thanks to anti-aliasing and stuff. Verdana and Georgia in the mid-1990s were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white. So Microsoft put a lot of care into optimizing these typefaces for the screen.

For about 15 years, all the web designers hated me because Georgia and Verdana were among the very few faces that they could use if they wanted to do legible text on the screen. Now they’ve got much wider choices. It’d be interesting to see whether Georgia and Verdana survive beyond the point where there is any technical reason to have them.

What do you think when you see them in high-resolution uses today — in print, or in applications like shop lettering?

I’m very open-minded about that. What happens most often is that people ask me about IKEA. Ever since there was that big ruckus about the IKEA catalog changing from Futura to Verdana, which I had nothing to do with and didn’t even know about, people ask me about that everywhere I go. I give a talk about something historical and then at the end someone will get up and say: “I started a petition to go back to Futura. You’re a villain!” You get blamed for something you had nothing to do with.

There’s a strange misunderstanding. A friendly guy came up to me at a conference recently and said: I signed that petition to go back to Futura. So I asked: what caused you to do that? And he said, well, Verdana is a screen font. You mustn’t use it in print. So I said: OK, well, so you open the IKEA catalog, it’s set in Verdana, with the big prices and everything… how do you tell it’s a screen font? What is it about Verdana that says: this is a screen font? He had no idea. He just knew it because he’d been told. There are many people who make judgments without really understanding what the typographic issues are. Students are interesting — they’ll say things to me like: my professor told me I cannot use Verdana and Georgia in print because they’re screen fonts, but I tried it and it looks perfectly alright. And I can only say: Thank you! Go ahead!

There are some peculiarities that came out of the original brief, and those are things I can explain to students. The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series. It might actually be something that in the IKEA catalogs works rather well: when using the bold at small sizes, you can really see the difference.

The most recent project where you collaborated with technicians and scientists is Sitka, a new serif family that comes with MS Windows 8.1. You worked in close collaboration with Microsoft’s Kevin Larson, famous for his legibility research, and with the designers at Tiro Typeworks. Did the process change your mind about science? Type designers are often very suspicious of legibility research.

Yes, and I was too. I’ve always taken an interest in it, but I often found it was not useful for me as a designer. What I wanted was to find legibility research papers that told me things that I didn’t already somehow know by common sense. When we did Bell Centennial, we were obviously very concerned about legibility — it was for phone books, six-point type on bad paper. But we researched things in a very primitive way. I would put up two different versions of the figure ‘2’ on the wall for example and then we walked back until maybe one of them was indistinct… It was very seat-of-the-pants.

When it came to the academic study of legibility, I did not find anything that I could use in a practical way. But then when I met Kevin Larson and got involved in this, it became very interesting. He has very definite ideas about how we read but at the same time he’s not overly dogmatic. Also, there are now better tools that study eye movement, and better understanding of how the brain reads. Talking to Kevin and the rest of the group at Microsoft, I was very intrigued.

I would work on the design up to a certain point, then hand it over to Kevin, who would do whatever stage of testing was appropriate. He would generate results and tabulate them, and find very good graphic ways of expressing why this was better than that. Still, a lot of the results were ambiguous or even contradictory. There are still things about reading and the testing of legibility that we don’t understand. But I think we’ve sort of advanced the state of the art regarding this particular kind of typeface and what is useful about testing.

What other projects have you been working on these past few years?

Apart from Sitka, the other major project was for a large newspaper in London. I think it will be released soon but it’s still sort of under wraps, so I can’t say much about it. At one time all my work, all my commissions, came from publications. Now it’s dried up, apart from the New York Times which is still a very good client of mine.

What I like to have in my life is the kind of situation that happened with the Miller typeface. I started it entirely on my own. No-one asked for it; I did not have a client. I was familiar with Scotch romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular, particularly in the States in the latter half of the 19th century, oddly enough, and then they disappeared completely. So I worked on that, Roger Black saw it and proposed it to one of the papers he worked for. And then it sort of exploded.

Miller and other families were produced in collaboration with several designers at Font Bureau. Do you like leaving the production work to others?

It depends on the nature of the project. I have a close and friendly relationship with Font Bureau and sometimes we do collaborate. What has often happened is that I will design part of a family, then later some of the Font Bureau designers will get involved in extending the family. This happens particularly when a face has gone out into the field and people say: we’d like a lighter version, or a very contrasted display version, or whatever it is. Several of the Font Bureau designers have worked with me on faces which I originated and took far enough for them to know what to do. Miller is a good case in point, because a number of different Font Bureau designers worked on that. Tobias Frere-Jones worked on it in an early stage, Cyrus Highsmith did a newspaper text version called Miller Daily. And then Richard Lipton did some sort of banner display version for very large sizes. So a lot of designers played a role in that.

In stylistic terms your work is incredibly diverse, as opposed to the typefaces by designers such as Gerard Unger or Adrian Frutiger, both of whom make fonts that express the same formal principles over and over again.

I have a theory about that. I think type designers come in two different kinds. Of the first, Gerard Unger is a very good example, as is Goudy or Zapf. I envy these people because they are designers of genius whose personality comes out in every typeface they design. I’m sure if Gerard designed a new typeface, the first time I’d pick up a newspaper or a magazine, I’d know it was by him. I read his handwriting. His personality shines through in everything he does.

I don’t have this kind of genius — I’m more of a chameleon. I think it’s easier for me to get inside the head of other designers. Leslie Cabarga has said about Big Caslon that it was like the spirit of Caslon shining through me. Which is a sort of rather new-age way of putting it. But I would be happy if that were true. I think it’s perhaps easier for me than it would be for Gerard or Hermann or Adrian to channel someone else in that way. It does interest me because in this business we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And if there is a justification for this, it’s because it allows us to see further.

So if you ask me if there is a thread that joins, say, Snell Roundhand to Verdana: I cannot see it. I do hope both faces are good in their own way, which are different ways. I love getting commissions for things that I have never done before. I always look forward to being challenged in that way.

You’re now in your mid-seventies. Has the thought of retirement ever occurred to you, if I may be so cheeky?

To be honest, I don’t have any interest in retiring. I mean, I don’t know what I would do. At 76, I don’t have the same stamina I had forty or fifty years ago — I’m not comfortable working as long hours as I used to. But I’ve never lost any interest in the work. As I just said: I’m always looking for new kinds of projects. Also, I’ve been either a business partner or a freelancer for so long — it’s hard for me to turn down work. You’re never sure where the next assignment will come from, so when somebody offers me a job, I say: yes, please!

So I suppose there’s not much in the world that you enjoy more than your work.

That’s right. And I don’t like the idea of giving up. When you work for yourself, no one tells you to retire. So… my retirement plan is death, haha. Is that a good note to end on?