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.

Cascade Cascade was the first typeface Carter designed after having been hired by Linotype in 1965. When a customer asked for a photo-composition version of Ludlow Script, Carter and Mike Parker decided not to make a copy but design a new face in the same vein. Cascade was named after the great blackout of November 1965, when power failed in the entire North-East due to a “cascade” of power plants shutting down one by one due to overload. Snell Roundhand Script In the days of metal type, printing types based on connected handwriting seldom looked good. Photo-composition solved that problem, and designers were challenged to design script faces that had never been possible before. Hence Snell Roundhand Script, one of Carter’s early fonts for Linotype. Based on the work by the seventeenth-century writing master Charles Snell, this classic English roundhand has remained a mainstay of the Linotype library. Bell Centennial Designed for telephone books in the 1970s, Bell Centennial has forms that are optimized for small print under difficult conditions. The names of the weights still recall the original use: not Regular or Bold, but Address, Name & Number, Sub Caption, Bold Listing. The giant ink traps were introduced to avoid the cluttering of ink on high-speed presses. Nowadays, the function of those striking shapes is almost completely lost – but graphic designers like their unorthodox look. Especially when used in bigger sizes, Bell Centennial looks very cool.