Matthew Carter, born British but now residing in the Boston area, is the creative force behind many widely used fonts today including Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia, New Century Schoolbook and Helvetica, to name a few.

Carter began his career as a traditional typeface designer, studying under Jan Van Krimpen’s assistant P. H. Raedisch, where he learned the distinctive craft of punch cutting and eventually transitioned into using digital methods to create his fonts, a more expedited method than traditional processes.

In a presentation given to members of the AIGA (New York Chapter), Carter reflected on his many experiences with developing the fonts he’s so famously known for and revealed that many, if not all of his creations, were inspired by actual typefaces from historical architecture.

According to Wikipedia, Matthew Carter “co-founded the Bitstream type foundry in 1981, which he left in 1991 to form the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone.”

Bitstream, Inc. was a first of its kind, a company formed solely for the purpose of the production and distribution of digital fonts and their respective licenses. Unlike traditional type foundries, where the typographers would sell wood and metal typefaces, Bitstream dealed exclusively with digital fonts.

If not for the hard work and impressive efforts of Matthew Carter, designers would be limited as far as font selection for print and web.

Whether he knows it or not, Matthew Carter has left behind a legacy that will continue to thrive in future generations, all because of his desires to preserve historical typefaces.

If you couldn’t tell by the lack of writing, I’m once again (maybe twice now) consumed by life’s responsibilities that I haven’t had much time to commit to this “blog” as I’ve had in the past.

The lack of TLC is attributed to several things, many of which are related to working a 40-hour work week as well as taking courses in the evening. Mix that in with everything else and you can begin to see why there hasn’t been much activity here in over a month.

Instead of allowing this site to transition from a state of limbo to complete neglect, I’ve decided to take a break from blogging for the time being. I can’t say exactly how long this will last, but rest assured it’ll only be a short break to effectively reboot myself.

When I do eventually return, I’ll also reboot this site as well, giving it a complete makeover but without Ty Pennington of course.

Thanks for reading. Have a great summer.

I’ll be seeing you again soon.

Update #3: (drumroll) Arno is/was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke. What a crazy — but funny — bloke!

Update #2: Jeremy Keith responds to Arno after receiving a similiar email, but for perfume.

Update: Arno responds to this post. (read below first if you haven’t already for the full scoop)

You know, I’ve sifted through a truckload of emails in the past few years about instant credit reports, money-making opportunities and not to mention salespeople interested in selling me everything from pet rocks to laser-guided golf ball retreivers.

In all this time I’ve never once received a domain acquisition email, until today of course.

Not more than 8 hours ago, I received an email from an Arno Zimmerman in regards to purchasing, or actually acquiring this domain for a “well-known Hollywood studio”. The email was a bit hazy, but to keep this on record for future conversations I’m presenting it here in it’s entirety.

Read on as I really can’t make this kind of stuff up:

Dear Mr Sagen,

My sincere apologies for writing to you unannounced. My name is Arno Zimmerman and I am CEO of an Internet domain name acquisitions agency based here in Los Angeles, California.

My agency is currently engaged by a well-known Hollywood studio. The studio is producing a new action movie called The Kartooner. The movie has an all star cast, including Bruce Willis in the title role, and will be released in the fall. My client is therefore very keen to purchase the rights to the domain name kartooner.com from you.

I am sure that you will understand that I cannot provide you with much in the way of information about our client at this time. However I can assure you that they are sincere in their offer, and that they are keen to conclude this purchase quickly.

I would be interested to learn how much you would require for this transfer of ownership.

Many kind regards,

Arno Zimmerman

Okay, admittedly, you caught me off guard Mr. Zimmerman. If someone were to tell me — like you just did — that Bruce Willis would be starring in an action movie called The Kartooner, I’d be hesistant to believe such a thing.

However, if you want to talk about the greenback, I might be willing to budge for about $66,000 dollars, give or take.

Let me know, alright? In the meantime, I’m going to try and figure out what I’d purchase with that kind of money.

Arno Responds

For the past few days I’ve been working diligently on a brand spanking new design for this site, as the current design has always been meant as a temporary placeholder. When I say brand spanking, I mean it, as it will include previous elements I’ve used in other site incarnations (mainly heaps of beige) and for the first time in this site’s history there will be an “artwork” section. (Oooh.)

One of the main reasons for this realignment “re-envisioning” is that I’d like to tie the blog together with my other domain, eriksagen.com which includes a working portfolio and a resume for the time being. Eventually there will be a slick company site in place of what’s there now, but that’s far off a bit.

Branding is crucial to me at this point and has worked well for other people, like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dan Cederholm (and Mike Davidson) to name a few. There’s an instant familiarity and connection when you visit these sites and that’s intentional, so bringing everything under one roof (albeit a sometimes leaky one) is important to me.

Back to my mentioning an artwork section, I’ve decided to beef up my portfolio. Over the years it’s become, well, a bit stagnant due to other priorities and distractions taking focus. However, shoving all that aside briefly, I’ll be putting up artwork from the past, present and future, which will be the present by the time I hang them up in a digital gallery.

Many thanks to the handful of supporters over the past few months (even you, Anton) for encouraging me to do this, especially since I advertise that I’m an illustrator and yet have very little to show for it. Who would’ve thunk?

In a nutshell, things will be changing for the better around these parts.

That’s all folks!