Matthew Carter is one of the preeminent contemporary typographers. His work is both ubiquitous (his typefaces Georgia and Verdana were commissioned by Microsoft and now grace computer screens around the world) and revolutionary (his Walker Art Center commission resulted in the creation of a series of alphabets with “detachable” serifs). Carter has been involved in typography in one way or another for most of his life. He has lived through the passing of numerous typographic eras, and at each juncture he has embraced both the latest technology and the new forms created by young designers. In addition to teaching at Yale University School of Art in the Graphic Design department, Carter operates Carter & Cone, a typographic studio and consultancy based in Boston. Typographic designer meets Joshua Berger of Plazm Magazine. Exerpt from ‘F30: Thirty Essential Typefaces’.

Interview, Ellen Lupton with Tobias Frere-Jones, November 1, 1995.

In 1984 husband-and-wife Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko launched a type company named Emigre, making it the first contemporary type foundry to sell original fonts made on and created for the computer. In addition to designing and licensing over 300 typefaces by a wide range of designers, Emigre also published a magazine for 21 years that published criticism and essays on graphic design while providing a beautiful showcase for Emigre’s fonts. This month, Emigre began another exploration in type and publication with Historia, a 62-page type specimen featuring VanderLans’s photos and stories about visiting thirteen California battlefields from the U.S.-Mexican War. I talked to VanderLans about creating original type-focused content, the renaissance of font-awareness, and what he can do about our ugly American currency. Interview with FastCompany.

Typography has long been called the designer’s common currency, but there is nothing at all common about visual language, particularly when it requires cultural, visual and linguistic nuances in order to succeed across international borders. German typographer Dirk Wachowiak recently caught up with the Czech-born Peter Bilak and Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit to discuss both their recent collaboration — the Hindi version of Bilak’s Fedra — and their plans for the future. Interview with Design Observer.

‘In 1991, I was low woman on the Print magazine masthead, which meant I was responsible for much of the editorial grunt work. It was my job to organize a debate between Massimo Vignelli and the type designer Ed Benguiat that took place in our offices that spring. Afterward, I transcribed the tape and edited the transcript for publication in Print’s September/October 1991 issue. Published under the rubric “Oppositions,” the debate was the second in a series. It followed “Tibor Kalman vs. Joe Duffy” — a 1990 dialogue about design ethics that was so notoriously cranky I didn’t feel the need to name names when I referred to its “antagonistic” participants in my introduction to its successor.

Print had brought Vignelli and Benguiat together because they looked like oil and water on paper. But rather than debate one another they surprised us by ganging up on Emigre magazine (1984–2009) as a symbol of the computer’s destructive influence on contemporary typography. What follows is an almost complete rerun of the 9,000-word original published version. Parts that have been skimmed away are indicated by ellipses (…).’ — Julie Lasky. A dialogue at Design Observer.

Dave Foster is a type disciple. He spends most of his days studying under the tutelage of some of the greatest living typographers of our age.

Foster is the 2011 recipient of the Design NSW: Travelling Scholarship offered each year by the NSW Government, with the support of the Powerhouse Museum and the British Council. He used his $18,000 scholarship to help fund a year-long Type & Media Masters Degree at the prestigious Royal Academy of Art (KABK). Its teaching focuses on the processes needed to create fonts suitable for all mediums.

‘New Zealand is a young country and hasn’t had the time, or resources to develop a typeface culture. I am free to draw upon multiple influences. I haven’t been taught or exposed to any one particular typographic heritage, so my hand isn’t biased.’

In the past few years the Klim Type Foundry has released a succession of finely crafted typefaces that have been as notable for their range and engagement with typographic history as for their immaculate execution. Klim is the work of one man, Kris Sowersby, a young New Zealander with a prodigious talent for drawing letters. Interview with Eye Magazine.

‘It’s to do with meaning, which forces its way up like a root growing under a pavement – it breaks the paving stones. Many people would like these neat stones in a nice grid, but unfortunately there is this tree with all its pressures and necessities and you have to follow it.’

Robin Kinross occupies a unique place in design publishing. After a narrow escape from academia he became a writer and then, with no great plan in mind, a full-time publisher, an activity that gives complete expression to his practical, material and reflective concerns. There is no one in British design quite like him but, perhaps because of his restrained and self-questioning personality, he has never received the wider recognition his achievement deserves. He is not someone Design Week would be likely to phone for a quote, or that D&AD would buttonhole for a jury. Kinross would be the last person to press his case in these temples of professional design, though his body of work, for those who read him and follow the output of his Hyphen Press (hyphenpress.co.uk), exudes a quiet, corrective authority. Situated between design practice, non-academic critical writing and the university, this self-avowed ‘Froshaugian’ sets high standards of scholarly inquiry and presentation in design and typographic studies. Interview with Eye Magazine.

‘It’s not a problem of being a woman in a man’s world. It’s being a type designer in a world that gives little recognition to this art form’.

As one of the first type designers to exploit the potential of the Apple Macintosh in its pre-designer days, Zuzana Licko transformed the pixel from low-resolution imitation to high-style original. Her early Emigre fonts not only revolutionised digital typography but also opened up the market for the smaller foundries whose quarter-page ads populate today’s design magazines. She has designed more than two dozen typeface families and oversees the Emigre foundry, which currently offers 300 or so typefaces by the likes of Barry Deck, Jonathan Barnbrook, Frank Heine and Rodrigo Cavazos. Interview with Eye Magazine.

‘Papers have all kinds of information on the same page; very distressing and very joyful; gossip and facts. I wanted to bring that variety, that liveliness into the typeface design.’ Interview with Eye Magazine.