A great one about the great one.

hhp

Great interview, props to Paul Shaw.
How refreshing to have questions asked about details of the new type as it compares to other faces, instead of the usual "I just discovered fonts let me give you a brief history and Gotham was Obama's campaign face" that passes for journalism.

Thus, Carter is unique in having designed type in every medium that has existed since the era of Gutenberg: metal, wood, film and digital.

I did wonder about that.
Surely there are others who have designed for all four media?

Three out of four maybe. Not sure how many can include wood. MC only added that feather to his cap relatively recently.

If we're talking living, I can only think of José
Mendoza y Almeida (but probably no wood for him).

hhp

Thus, Carter is unique in having designed type in every medium that has existed since the era of Gutenberg: metal, wood, film and digital.

Why is rubdown transfer type, e.g. Letraset, so seldom remembered as one of the type media that have existed since the era of Gutenberg?

How are dry-transfer sheets manufactured? Is it an optical process, in which case maybe it could be slotted with "film"?

Has Matthew Carter ever designed a font for routered nameplates/signs?

It's too bad they ran the images in the wrong proportions (more vertical than they should be). This is the same article that appeared a couple of months ago on the Imprint section of Print's website, where you can see the images in the correct proportions.

>Has Matthew Carter ever designed a font for routered nameplates/signs?

Would the "wood" count?

Why don't they mention embroidery lettering? :-)

Come on Si, they didn't even MENTION Leroy!

How dry transfer lettering is manufactured (serigraphy) is not the printing medium.
The typography was done by rubbing onto paper.
Sure, it was then photographed for film assembly, but that wasn't typography either, and type imaged by any medium (e.g. letterpress) was also photographed for film assembly.

Similarly, it could be argued that a slightly earlier method (1930s) of typesetting is also a unique category—I refer to the assembly of letters pre-printed on transparent adhesive film. This product was still available in the 1980s, but I forget its name. One used a scalpel blade to cut a single "b" (for instance) from a group of b's on their backing sheet, peel it off, and position it on the knock-out blue baseline one had drawn on the artboard.

Mark, the article actually features the original images, with correct proportions (even hotlinked from imprint.printmag.com). It is just that Salon.com’s CSS stupidly forces them into a too narrow column. As they have a fixed height assigned, the browser has no choice but to squeeze them horizontally.

I figured that was probably the reason.

Nick, it was called Formatt. I still have some catalogs. I liked Formatt because they carried hard-to-find typefaces.

There was also a typesetting system called Fototype that you set like metal type, but was printed on paperboard. I've got some of it:

And let's not forget skywriting, which has both cursive and raster-line forms! :-/

hhp

Carter's stubborn refusal to design a skywriting font will surely tarnish his legacy.

:)

"Carter's stubborn refusal to design a skywriting font will surely tarnish his legacy."

Some might think Carter is correct for not Glyphing into the Wind ;-)