While playing with the typography of this blog, I couldn’t appreciate enough the simplicity and elegance of Tahoma, it’s wider sister Verdana and beauty serif Georgia. All of those fonts were designed by one guy — Matthew Carter, English type designer born 1937, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.
Matthew Carter
Thomas Rickner
While you have probably heard of Matthew Carter, it’s unlikely that you’ll know Tom Rickner who hinted these fonts making them so easy to read at sizes with very few ink dots available to form their shape and guide the eye.
In the summer of 1994 Microsoft commissioned Carter and Rickner to design a new system font for Windows 95 which we now know as Tahoma. Here is the story of Verdana.
Once you’ll discover where the names of those fonts come from, you’ll never look at them the same way.
Hello, I came by your website. Interesting post. I use “web-safe” fonts over and over all day long when I’m designing for the web. Nice to know the story behind these fonts. Great picture of Matthew Carter by the way… Cheers