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. 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 (for newspaper text), Bell Centennial (for the US telephone directories), ITC Charter, and faces for Greek, Cyrillic and Devanagari. For Carter & Cone he designed Mantinia, Sophia, Elephant, Big Caslon, Alisal and Miller. He designed Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Nina and Sitka for Microsoft, and Carter Sans for Monotype Imaging.
Carter is a Royal Designer for Industry, and a Senior Critic on Yale's Graphic Design faculty. In 2010 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian National Design Awards. Seven of his type designs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.