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One of this century´s foremost type designers and co-founders of Bitstream, (America´s first digital type foundry), Matthew Carter shares his insight and experience regarding 20th century typography in America, ATF, Morris Fuller Benton, Linotype, ITC, Swiss International type design, current typographic movements and more.
Today Carter is the principal of Carter & Cone Type in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of this century's foremost type designers and co-founders of Bitstream, (America´s first digital type foundry), Matthew Carter shares his insight and experience regarding 20th century typography in America, ATF, Morris Fuller Benton, Linotype, ITC, Swiss International type design, current typographic movements and more. Today Carter is the principal of Carter & Cone Type in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of this century´s foremost type designers and co-founders of Bitstream, (America's first digital type foundry).
Q. Is there a seminal event that marked the beginning of 20th century typography in America? A. I would say that the most important event occurred just before the turn of the century in 1892 when the American Type Founders Company (ATF) was formed through a merger of 23 of the country´s most prominent type foundries. Until then, most big American cities had at least one type foundry to service the local newspapers and printers. These foundries designed their own typefaces and liberally copied each other.
Q. What prompted the major American foundries to merge? A. The invention of the Linotype created an overpopulation of type foundries in America and led to tremendous competition and cost-cutting. But a Milwaukee engineer named Linn Boyd Benton put the first “nail in the coffin” of local foundries in 1884 when he invented a pantographic punchcutter, a router-like engraving machine for cutting the steel punches for type. That was the most important technical development in typography since Gutenberg´s invention of variable-width type molds in the 15th century. Benton´s punchcutting machine enabled Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant in Baltimore, to create the Linotype in 1886. Instead of setting founder´s type, the Linotype cast a solid line, or slug, of hot-metal type from brass matrices brought into position by means of a keyboard. A couple of years later, Tolbert Lanston of Washington, D.C., invented the Monotype, which cast individual letters through a machine-driven process. These advances reduced the need for foundry type since brass matrices didn´t wear out as quickly. To survive the inroads made by Linotype and Monotype, ATF was formed to supply precast metal type nationwide.
Q. So, ATF´s famous Linn Boyd Benton actually brought about the downfall of traditional foundries through his invention? A. Yes, the irony is that Benton invented the pantographic punchcutter for use by traditional type founders, but it facilitated the commercial success of Linotype and Monotype.
Q. What was ATF´s contribution to typography?
A. It brought together a group of remarkable people who invented the modern type business. There were the two Bentons: Linn Boyd and his son, Morris Fuller Benton; ATF´s president Robert W. Nelson, who turned this amalgamation of competitors into a real company, and Henry Lewis Bullen, the publicity manager who skillfully promoted ATF products. Not only did ATF centralize type production and open sales offices around the country, it really understood marketing. It produced massive specimen books and conceived the idea of type families, reasoning that if you design a roman and an italic, you would have a captive audience for the bold face as well.
Q. What was Morris Fuller Benton´s contribution? A. Morris Fuller Benton designed some 246 typefaces for ATF, including Century Schoolbook, Franklin and News Gothics, Hobo, Broadway, Alternate Gothic, Stymie, and Cloister Black. He was also the commercial pioneer of historical revivals. His Bodoni and Garamond designs are still two of the most successful revivals in type history. Morris joined ATF as his father´s assistant in 1896, after graduating from Cornell. His first job was to rationalize the type libraries of the 23 foundries that had come together as ATF. This involved culling out duplicate faces, integrating the rest (sometimes by combining faces from different sources into a single family), and converting them all to the newly adopted pica point system. Morris Benton´s contribution to the modern type business has been greatly underestimated by most people. I think it was because he was such a reticent and unassuming person by nature that it was nearly impossible to get him to say anything about his work.
Q. Where did Linotype fit into the picture? A. Initially, all of Linotype´s customers were newspapers because they had the most pressing production deadlines and were the first to move from hand to mechanical composition. In time, Linotype was used for book composition and eventually for advertising, which relied more on display faces. For the first 20 or so years of its existence, however, Linotype just followed ATF´s lead and copied its faces.
Q. Why have European-originated typefaces had such an enormous influence on 20th century American design? A. European type had always been imported into the U.S., but a greater variety of typefaces began arriving this century because companies such as Linotype had sister companies in Great Britain and Germany. These imported products had a profound influence on typographic taste in America. The internationalization of type accelerated after World War II, with the introduction of photo composition and digital technology. Before the war, if a person had been blindfolded and parachuted into a European country, he would know where he was, based on the typeface around him. Today new designs from Holland, Berlin or California appear simultaneously worldwide and the international typographic scene has become homogenized.
Q. Are revivals of the classics also a 20th century phenomenon? A. Most definitely. We have a more pluralistic view of type today. If you go back to previous centuries, say, to a type foundry in Europe in 1830, the only type you could buy was “Modern” (Bodoni and Didot). Caslon had been scrapped and melted down. When a style changed, it changed absolutely. You couldn´t buy Caslon until there was a Caslon revival.
Q. Why was the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) formed? A. ITC started in 1970 when type fonts still had to be bought from the company that made the typesetting machine. If you had a Linofilm photosetter, for instance, you could only buy the grids (image sources) from Linofilm. Individual type designers would sell their faces to composing machine manufacturers, who adapted them for their equipment and paid the designers royalties. The problem was that photo technology made it easier for composing machine suppliers to pirate type styles. To counter this widespread abuse, designer Herb Lubalin and typographer Aaron Burns joined forces with Ed Rondthaler of Photo-Lettering, Inc., to create a type design agency. ITC worked with type designers such as Hermann Zapf to prepare their fonts and produce the original art for licensing to manufacturers.
Q. How did photo composition impact the availability of faces? A. Hot metal gave way to photo composition in the ´60s and with it, the cost of producing a font dropped dramatically enough to instigate a huge expansion of type libraries. Then in the mid-´70s, Linotype came out with a photo composition machine that could handle both text and display. That´s when we saw a campaign to incorporate the text and display libraries and pull in historical revivals and old-fashioned foundry types. The distinction between American and European libraries disappeared as well.
Q. How did ITC gain market acceptance of its products? A. The beauty of ITC´s marketing concept was that the three founders were part of the Madison Avenue “mafia.” New York´s advertising scene was a hot bed for new type styles as well as a technical resource for designing them. ITC had a captive market for its work. Herb Lubalin was not only a good source of ideas, his colleagues were happy to use his faces.
Q. How did the introduction of digital technology change conditions? A. The birth of independent digital type foundries coincided with the birth of the Macintosh and the open PostScript font format. Bitstream, a firm I co-founded, was the first American independent digital foundry. That meant that if you bought a Linotype digital PostScript imagesetter, you could buy your type from Linotype, Adobe, Compugraphics — or Bitstream. With the desktop computer, type ceased to be a machine part. You could buy it anywhere. Emigré was a pioneer in making digital type for the Mac as soon as it was possible to do that.
Q. Why are more people designing type these days? A. The tools are more accessible, the technology is easier to master, and the means to sell type is more convenient. In the days of hot metal, there were high barriers to getting involved in the type business because you had to get manufacturers to pay attention to you. Today even if a face enjoys only moderate sales, you won´t lose money or go bankrupt.
Q. What were some of the significant type design movements in the 20th century? A. Although sans serif type was invented in the 19th century, it was popularized this century. A lot of people say that sans serif came from the Bauhaus, but that´s not the whole truth. I think Edward Johnston´s type design for the Underground Railway in London in 1918 was influential. Not long after the face was introduced a deputation of German printers visited London and saw the Underground sans. The development of Futura, Kabel and other important German sans serif faces in the 1920s was connected to the Bauhaus and its search for pure functional form, free of excessive ornamentation and historical baggage.
Q. What about Swiss International Type Design? A. If you continue along the development of sans serif, you come straight into the phenomenon of Swiss design, which had a big influence on the teaching of graphic design in America. Helvetica — which really was a rationalization of some traditional 19th century Swiss designs as well as Bauhaus influenced — was introduced in the late ´50s. Part of its success was due to the fact that American Linotype decided not to import the European matrices, but to manufacture them here in accordance with U.S. standards. As a result, Helvetica ran immediately on American composing machines without any technical difficulties. It became the hot new face. On the other hand, Monotype imported Univers into the U.S., and it never made the inroads in America that Helvetica did.
Q. Are we in a typographic movement now? A. We are seeing a lot of experimental work, some of it is very liberating and good. But we are passing out of this phase. Even Emigré has produced historically inspired designs.
Q. You trained as a punchcutter and worked in hot metal, photo composition and digital platforms. Which is best? A. On balance, we are better off than we have ever been. The present technology ÿ both input and reproduction with high-end imaging devices ÿ represents the single best way of working for any type designer. I consider myself lucky to have known previous technologies with their advantages and disadvantages. I believe I appreciate what we have now more than a 20-year-old who may think: I know Fontographer, therefore I am a type designer.
Q. What sustains your fascination with type design? A. It´s a problem-solving exercise. The fascination is the tension between the functional aspects of the letters — an A has to look like an A. You can´t distort an A beyond a certain point. You have huge conventions restraining you, but on the other hand, you have the desire to find a way to put a little bit of yourself into what you are doing, even if it is circumscribed. Design is very much in the personality put in the faces.
Q. Is it possible to know which ´90s typefaces will become classics? A. If anyone can predict that accurately, he´d be rich by now. There is something about type design that appeals to people at a certain time. Maybe the success of Ed Benguiat´s Souvenir, which has fluid shapes and no hard corners, was a reaction against the Swiss sans serif in the ´70s. When Baskerville appeared in print in the 18th century, people said the letters were so shocking compared to Caslon that they would damage your eyesight. Initially, people found Futura shocking as well. An avant garde face must become assimilated in a historical sense before it becomes a classic. And today the rate at which the mainstream assimilates the avant garde is fantastic.
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One of this century´s foremost type designers and co-founders of Bitstream, (America´s first digital type foundry), Matthew Carter shares his insight and experience regarding 20th century typography in America, ATF, Morris Fuller Benton, Linotype, ITC, Swiss International type design, current typographic movements and more.
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