Son of Harry Carter, Royal Designer for Industry, contemporary British type designer and ultimate craftsman, trained as a punchcutter at Enschedé by Paul Rädisch, responsible for Crosfield’s typographic program in the early 1960s, Mergenthaler Linotype’s house designer 1965–1981.
Carter co-founded Bitstream with Mike Parker in 1981. In 1991 he left Bitstream to form Carter & Cone with Cherie Cone.
He has in recent years designed Verdana and Georgia for Microsoft; these fonts are tuned to be extremely legible even at very small sizes on the screen.