Carter and Cone
Carter left Bitstream in 1991 and in 1992 formed the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone. Carter's recent typefaces have been published by a range of retailers including ITC, Font Bureau and Monotype, often in collaboration with Carter and Cone, together with his custom designs created for companies such as Microsoft.
Of Carter's recent typefaces, the serif web typeface Georgia is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century. It was based on designs for a print typeface in the same style Carter was working on when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller some years later. Speaking in 2013 about the development of Georgia and Miller, Carter said, "I was familiar with Scotch romans, puzzled by the fact that they were once so popular ... and then they disappeared completely."
Many of Carter's typefaces were created to address specific technical challenges, for example those posed by early computers. Charter was created to use a minimal number of design elements to fit in a small memory space on early computers, a problem that had expired even before he finished the design. The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that, "Verdana and Georgia ... were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white ... The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series." Some of Carter's early typeface digitizations would later be revisited: Monotype released an expanded version of Charter and Font Bureau expanded versions of Georgia, Verdana, Big Caslon and others. Earlier in his career, Bell Centennial was created to be legible in telephone directories, even when printed on cheap paper at small sizes.
Carter's only typeface to bear his name is Carter Sans. It is a 'glyphic' sans-serif with flaring towards the end of each letter. It was inspired by Albertus, a popular British typeface created by Berthold Wolpe for Monotype. Carter knew Wolpe early in his career and helped digitize one of his less-known typefaces for a 1980 retrospective of his work.
One of Carter's more unusual projects was a typeface, Van Lanen, for the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum. A 'Latin'-style wedge serif typeface, it was released both in digital form and wood type. In an article on it, Carter noted that it has been "50 years since a type of my design had been in a physical form that I could hold in my hand."
Carter has taught on Yale University's graphic design programme since 1976. He also designed the university's corporate typeface, Yale, at the request of John Gambell, the University Printer. Carter has said that this was the first time in designing a typeface that he focused more on capital than lowercase letters, since he knew that on the building signs the lettering would be in capitals. Carter wrote that:
The signs, whether free-standing or attached to walls, reminded me of inscriptions, and this led me to think about the inscriptional origins of Roman caps and the everlasting problem of reconciling capitals with lowercase. For me, the moment when the first true synthesis occurred was in the type of De Aetna. This led me in turn to the Beinecke Library to pore over their copy of the book and its type – the archetype of Roman type for me.
