Mike Parker

TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Dec 13 00:43:54 EST 2024

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Mike Parker Born in London in 1929, he died in 2014. Mike had degrees in architecture and graphic design from Yale. In 1958-59 he put in order the punches, matrices and molds at the Plantin Museum. Director of Typographic Development at Mergenthaler Linotype Co from 1959 to 1981 [he succeeded Jackson Burke, who in turn succeeded Chauncey H. Griffith]. Matthew Carter worked with Mike Parker at Linotype from 1965 until 1981, when they both left to co-found Bitstream with Cherie Cone and Rob Friedman. He founded Pages Software in 1990. Eightieth birthday pic. Recipient of the 2012 SOTA Typography Award. In 2009, he created Star ling (Font Bureau) and Starling Italic [a total of 12 styles], named after Starling Burgess, who Mike believes was the real creator of Times-Roman, and not the cunning Morison. Font Bureau: In 1904 William Starling Burgess, Boston racing sailor, designed his second type. Six years later, now the Wright Brothers' partner, Starling quit type, returning the drawings to Monotype. Frank Pierpont collected the nameless roman for British Monotype, passing it to Stanley Morison in 1932 for The London Times. Mike Parker found the original superior, and prepared this Starling series for Font Bureau, who found it to be "the right stuff". In this picture, one can compare, top to bottom, Times New Roman (1931, Monotype), Starling (2009) and Plantin (1913, Monotype). All have their historic roots in Granjon's work of 1567. Warning: Many [most] typophiles believe that this Starling Burgess story is all made up by the gang of Parker (which includes the Font Bureau people). Whatever the truth is, it's a good story. Cyrus Highsmith quotes this from the 2011 TDC Medal ceremony honoring Mike Parker: I met Mike Parker in the late 90s, soon after I'd graduated from college. It was the dotcom era. My friends from school all got these amazing jobs making websites for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I had just started working at Font Bureau, making typefaces, for quite a bit less. But I didn't mind. This was an exciting time for me. I was living with my girlfriend in Cambridge, above the store where she worked. I took the train to get to the office. It was the beginning of my adult life. Then one day at work, I was hunched over a my desk, probably kerning, in comes Mike Parker. He seemed to tower over everything. He spoke in this booming mid-atlantic accent. Who was this guy? I had thought I was a grown-up. But suddenly, in Mike's presence I was a small child again, staring with my mouth hanging open, terrified of this improbable older person in the room. I tried to make myself invisible when he was around. Soon enough this all changed though. Soon we became good friends, in fact. Mike was a even frequent house guest. I remember helping him carry his impossibly heavy garment bag from the train station to my apartment. I still don't know what was in there. We'd have dinner together, me, Mike and my wife-to-be Anna. Mike enthusiastically ate everything Anna put in front of him. At these dinners, I learned about Starling Burgess and Times New Roman, how Helvetica came to America, that Adrian Frutiger was very kind but Stanley Morison was a rascal, and that Matthew Carter liked the Batman TV show. I think for Anna's sake, Mike talked about other things also. We heard about his first exposure to the radical new theory of plate tectonics when he was a student at Yale, ancient tribes of lost people, the melting of the polar ice caps, and how much he liked his son Harry. These conversations would often go on for hours, late into the night. Meanwhile, I was working as an assistant type designer, learning my craft. In my own time, I was drawing some of my own first typefaces. Part of Font Bureau's release process at that time was to send a specimen of the new typeface to Mike. Then he would write the 60-70 word blurb about it for the specimen page. It was marketing. We called them the font bios. It was through this process, that I got to know Mike. After I sent him a specimen of my typeface, he would call me at the office or at home so we could talk about it. And we'd talk for hours. And thanks to these conversations, I learned about ideas in my work I didn't know I had, how my typeface fit into typographic history, how it fit into the future. Mike took my work seriously in a way that no one else did. This made a big difference to my development as a designer at a very critical early stage of my career. I will always be grateful to Mike for that. Highly recommended video. The ultimate tribute to Mike Parker by Font Bureau.	EXTERNAL LINKS Mike Parker [Designer info] MyFonts search Monotype search Fontspring search Google search INTERNAL LINKS Type personalities ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type design in the United Kingdom ⦿