Mike Russell Parker | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1929 |
| Died | February 23, 2014 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Typographer and type designer |
| Known for | Directing Mergenthaler Linotype Company; founding Bitstream Inc. |
Mike Russell Parker (1929 - February 23, 2014) was a British-born American typographer and type designer.
Parker is known for rediscovering a "nameless Roman" type font and preparing it as a Starling series for Font Bureau. [1]
Parker was born in London in 1929, the son of a geologist Russell Johnson Parker. Russell Parker was murdered in the 1949 bombing of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108. [2] He had intended to follow his father into the profession, but was prevented from doing do due to colorblindness. [3] He attended Yale University. [4] He graduated with a degree in architecture and a master's in design. [5] He then worked at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. [6]
Parker joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as Jackson Burke's assistant and heir; within two years becoming Director. Under Parker's leadership over 1,000 typefaces, including Helvetica, were added to the library making them available wherever Linotype equipment was in use, including complete series of Hebrew and Greek scripts. This was made possible through Parker’s organization of shared typeface development between the five separate companies in the Linotype Group worldwide. Parker was responsible for bringing in internationally known designers such as Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf. The result was a library that became the standard of the industry. [7]
In 1981, Parker left Mergenthaler with Matthew Carter, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman to co-found Bitstream Inc, a type design company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [8] While revenues from the sale of typesetting equipment were dwindling, they recognized a business opportunity in the design and sale of type itself, due to the changing technologies that allowed type to be independent of equipment. Bitstream, largely financed through prepayment for the type library by several newly formed imagesetting companies, developed a library of digital type that could be licensed for use by anyone. Bitstream was highly successful during the 1980s when digital design and production, desktop publishing and personal computer use became virtually universal in the Western World. [9]
Parker was featured in the film Helvetica , a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. [10] He wrote the introduction for the re-issue of Stanley Morison's A Tally of Types , published by David Godine. [11]
In mid-1990, Parker, along with Victor Spindler, a professional graphic designer, founded Pages Software Inc to create a design-oriented desktop publishing software package. Venture funding was secured by the end of 1991, and the product -- Pages by Pages -- shipped in March 1994 for the NeXTSTEP platform. Over the next 14 months, successive commercial versions were released, including a web-page editor. However, the small NeXTSTEP installed base was insufficient to support the company, and it closed its doors in mid-1995.
Upon the closing of Pages Software in 1995, Parker licensed the Pages patent to Design Intelligence in Seattle and joined the company as an in-house consultant. In 2000, Design Intelligence was bought by Microsoft. With that, Parker had come full circle, he had completed a process that began with Gutenberg's transformation of flexible but laborious calligraphy into modular fonts of movable type, and ended with similar digital modules of expert design that guide all aspects of a whole document's appearance.[ citation needed ]
In 1994, Parker published evidence that the design of Times New Roman, credited to Stanley Morison in 1931 was based on Starling Burgess' 1904 drawings for Lanston Monotype Foundry. This publication attracted the attention of Roger Black, noted design director and former avid Linotype customer, and David Berlow former colleague at both Linotype and Bitstream. Parker joined their co-founded company, the Font Bureau, as a Consultant, Type Historian and Type Designer. In 2009, Parker released "Starling", a Roman font with a matching italic series based on the 1904 design of William Starling Burgess.[ citation needed ]
Parker died on February 23, 2014. [12]
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Palatino is the name of an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
Bitstream Inc. was a type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter, Mike Parker, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, all former employees of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. It was located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The font business, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in March 2012. The remainder of the business, responsible for Pageflex and Bolt Browser, was spun off to a new entity named Marlborough Software Development Holdings Inc. It was later renamed Pageflex, Inc following a successful management buyout in December 2013.
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper The Times in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in The Times's advertising department. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers.
The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine, a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacturer of book and newspaper typesetting equipment; outside North America, its only serious challenger for book typesetting was the Anglo-American Monotype Corporation.
Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text.
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used typefaces.
Arial is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers.
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices. Incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, the company has been responsible for many developments in printing technology—in particular the Monotype machine, which was a fully mechanical hotmetal typesetter, that produced texts automatically, all single type. Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs, including Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Arial, Bembo and Albertus.
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
Rudolph Ruzicka was a Czech American wood engraver, etcher, illustrator, typeface designer, and book designer. Ruzicka designed typefaces and wood engraving illustrations for Daniel Berkeley Updike's Merrymount Press, and was a designer for, and consultant to, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company for fifty years. He designed a number of seals and medals, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association.
Janson is the name given to a set of old-style serif typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period, and modern revivals from the twentieth century. Janson is a crisp, relatively high-contrast serif design, most popular for body text.
Max Miedinger was a Swiss typeface designer, best known for creating the Neue Haas Grotesk typeface in 1957, renamed Helvetica in 1960. Marketed as a symbol of cutting-edge Swiss technology, Helvetica achieved immediate global success.
Walter Valentine Tracy RDI was an English type designer, typographer and writer.
Century is a family of serif type faces particularly intended for body text. The family originates from a first design, Century Roman, cut by American Type Founders designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894 for master printer Theodore Low De Vinne, for use in The Century Magazine. ATF rapidly expanded it into a very large family, first by Linn Boyd, and later by his son Morris.
Electra is a serif typeface designed by William Addison Dwiggins and published by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1935 onwards. A book face intended for body text, Dwiggins described the design as intended to be a 'modern roman type letter' with 'personality', avoiding direct revival of any historical model. He therefore chose the name Electra to suggest electricity and crisp modernity, "like metal shavings coming off a lathe".
ITC Galliard is the name of a serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter and issued in 1978 by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
Ehrhardt is an old-style serif typeface released by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1938. Ehrhardt is a modern adaptation of printing types of "stout Dutch character" from the Dutch Baroque tradition sold by the Ehrhardt foundry in Leipzig. These were cut by the Hungarian-Transylvanian pastor and punchcutter Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis while in Amsterdam in the period from 1680 to 1689.
Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.
The Legibility Group is a series of serif typefaces created by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company and intended for use in newspapers on Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. They were developed in-house by Linotype's design team, led by Chauncey H. Griffith, and released from 1922, when the first member, Ionic No. 5, appeared.
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