Exciting news for all type-geeks everywhere! Today, typography legend Matthew Carter won a $500k Genius Grant. The MacArthur Foundation honors a graphic design legend, who created Verdana, Georgia, and dozens of other fonts we have used many times over the years. “Matthew Carter is a master type designer who crafts letterforms of unequaled elegance and precision for a seemingly limitless range of applications and media,” the MacArthur Foundation’s Web site says. “Throughout his career, which spans the migration of text from the printed page to the computer screen, he has pursued typographic solutions for the rapidly changing landscape of text-based communications.” A true craftsman and founder of Bitstream (a powerhouse type foundry), the 72 year old has been a prolific designer unassumingly crafting hundreds of faces that succeed precisely because you don't notice them. From early projects like AT&T's Bell Centennial typeface, to more recent work adapting to digital media with screen-friendly typefaces like Verdana and Georgia, his style is characterized by simplicity and readability. He has produced type for a raft of publications. Among them: Time, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Wired, and Newsweek. The New York Times’s headline typefaces were designed by Carter. "Matthew Carter is often described as the most widely read man in the world," the New Yorker wrote in a 2005 profile
