Mike Parker (typographer)

Mike Russell Parker
Born	1929 (1929) London
Died	(2014-02-23)February 23, 2014 Portland, Maine
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]

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Obviously, research, understand who you're going to see-- who that person is or that agency is or that client. Do your background homework. Have some key bullet points set up in your mind. You might not be able to have notes. So rehearse that, as well, in your mind. Sometimes, you can't have props and folios and it's just a chat. So basically, prepare. The best piece of advice was a really good design director, creative director I had, that basically instilled this thing of design thinking into my process. So as you're doing and working and thinking, think about the reason you're doing it. So why is this green, for example? What is this font? And I call that design thinking. It's like thinking as you're doing it. The brief will help to inform that, but as you go, you have to have this conversation in your head that's about why am I doing this? What is this? What is this illustration? What's this type face doing? And therefore, your rationale is really clear. It's still creative. You're still thinking creatively all the time. And you might, ultimately, post-rationalize some of that. But thinking about what you're going to say about design work and creative work is really important, because you're working with small clients who are very passionate about their small brand, or massive global clients. They all need to have this buy in process. Why are you doing this? Why is it red? So these things are really important. That's the most important thing, I think, for my career and thinking and process that I've got now. I work with a lot of brands, all sorts of sizes. There's definitely a sort of speeding up of everything. And this comes from, I think, digital platforms and products and apps, getting stuff out there. So in the digital world, they call it MVP, minimum viable product. There's now minimum viable brand, if you're working with big brands. And I think that's basically get stuff out there. Don't be too precious with it. I think a lot of big pieces of work get stuck in red tape, bureaucracy. So I think it's going to be a speeding up of like, let's just get this out there. The social media, the impacts of all that, it will direct it really quickly. So if something's wrong, you'll know about it from your customers. So I think there's a much more agile side of branding coming and all the touch points within that. Great craft-- so attention to detail-- really good attention to detail. I was at a meeting this morning with a third party, and it was an agency. And the typography was, yes, they're doing a lot of work, but some of the typography was not up to scratch. So I think having good core craft skills is good. Energy, passion-- really important. And someone who wants to keeps learning, someone who will challenge you, challenge your job-- you want to be on your toes. So people who are multi-talented are more and more coming in-- some people that code a bit, design a bit, but still have that craft level, because if you become a jack of all trades, it's dangerous-- but someone that is willing to learn who has craft skills, but has a handle of fluid, digital world. Again, I work with challenger brands or challenger people, start ups. And to do justice to those sorts of briefs or brands, having something that stands out in that category-- so it could be a booze brand or it could be a charity, but try and do something that feels different to that category. And I think if someone's starting to do that in a folio at any age, and they've challenged norms or they've got this really impressive stand out piece of visual direction and it's got a thought behind it that is still relevant-- you can't just do stuff for the sake of it. So if it has relevance to that category but stands out, that's really key, because people are thinking about the bigger picture, trying to make a mark, and trying to do award-winning work, basically

Life and career

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]

Timeline

1951: BA Architecture, Yale University
1952–1954: US Army Korea
1956 MFA: Graphic School of Design, Yale University
1956–1957: Typographic Project for I.M. Pei
1957–1959: Plantin Moretus Museum, Antwerp
1959–1981: Mergenthaler Linotype Company
1981–1987: Bitstream Inc.
1987–1989: The Company
1990–1995: Pages Software, Inc.
1996–1999: Design Intelligence, Inc.
2000–2014: Font Bureau

References

^ "Font Bureau". Fontbureau.com. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "Mike Parker, typographer who made Helvetica font a favorite, dies - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "Mike Parker, typographer who made Helvetica font a favorite, dies - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "Mike Parker, typographer who made Helvetica font a favorite, dies - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "Mike Parker, typographer who made Helvetica font a favorite, dies - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "Mike Parker, typographer who made Helvetica font a favorite, dies - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^ "The history of the Times New Roman typeface". Financial Times. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
^ "An Interview With Matthew Carter". Print. 2011-03-02. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
^ "Font Bureau People - Mike Parker". Fontbureau.com. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
^ "About Helvetica". Gary Hustwit. Archived from the original on 28 June 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
^ "A Tally of Types by Stanley Morison ; edited by Brooke Crutchley, introduction by Mike Parker". Godine.com. Archived from the original on 18 December 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
^ Elizabeth Landau, CNN (28 February 2014). "CNN Helvetica typographer dies". CNN. Retrieved 13 November 2014. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)

Other source

Interview, September 2010, recorded by Frank Romano, RIT Professor Emeritus, detailed Parker's life and work.

External links

This page was last edited on 4 April 2024, at 15:20

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