In this special Type Tuesday guest column, TypeNetwork‘s Lucas Czarnecki interviews veteran type designer Steve Matteson.
Steve Matteson’s work is everywhere—from Microsoft’s Segoe to Google’s Droid and Noto, to custom fonts for Toyota, Unilever, Rocket Mortgage, and more. Matteson‘s career follows a winding trail that began with studying letterpress and typography at Rochester Institute of Technology. It includes engineering, design, and management roles at Monotype; co-founding Ascender Corporation, an eventual return to independent practice at Matteson Typographics; and, as of today, he starts a new role as Cary Professor of Graphic Arts at RIT, his alma mater.
In our conversation, below, he shares his early calligraphy mishaps, his love of letterpress, and the particular thrill of “making something that makes something.”
If I can facilitate the accuracy or poignancy of communication, then I’ve done my job.
(Conversation lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Let’s start at the beginning. How and when did you discover that letters were actually drawn or made by somebody?
I was a middle school kid, and my dad had a friend who was a calligrapher. He gave my dad a gift—a poem written with gorgeous chancery italic letters. I couldn’t believe a person could have done that by hand, but it was a recognition of letters as artistic forms. I remember thinking, “Wow, I want to try!” When given a dip pen, I ended up with ink splatters and not much else.
Years later, when I was at RIT, I finally learned calligraphy properly, how to hold a pen at the proper angles, and the repetition of pen strokes, which establishes the rhythm of letters and words.
Was RIT where you got serious about typography?
Absolutely. My dad nudged me toward printing because the industry was one of the largest employers in America. He was concerned that I would get a job that would support my music ambitions—the stereotypical “have something to fall back on.” I landed at Rochester Institute of Technology, studying commercial printing. Luckily, they stressed the importance of the history of printing, and they had us handling physical type in the letterpress lab. I loved the hands-on experience of working with type that other courses couldn’t offer. We also had a Macintosh lab, which got me excited about the future. I was in an enviable position of learning the cutting edge while being steeped in tradition.
Luckily, RIT would also honor typography and printing achievement with the Goudy Award each year. This allowed me to meet people who were making a living in the industry. John Dreyfus, Matthew Carter, Hermann Zapf and Chuck Bigelow all came to offer a formal student and faculty lecture while I was a student there. Meeting them gave me a real sense that type was a living profession and not just a lost art found in type specimen books. Moments like that helped cement the idea that type design wasn’t just something to admire – it was something I could aspire to do.
People of all ages enjoy the process of making something physical to put their name on, whether it’s an abstract broadside or a poem.
Sounds like your freshman experience with letterpress printing set a high watermark for you. I understand you still do letterpress printing?
Yes! I’m a board member for a group here in Boulder called the Book Arts League. We teach classes in calligraphy, typography, bookbinding, letterpress—the works. It’s about preserving the craft. Setting a line of type by hand, printing it, and seeing the results is so satisfying; I like to share that experience. I find people of all ages enjoy the process of making something physical to put their name on, whether it’s an abstract broadside or a poem.
As an avid letterpress printer myself, I completely agree. Going back a little, what did you do after college?
My first job was at a small company making fonts for embedding into laser printers – I was strictly engineering and hinting fonts which were already in a digital format. Then Monotype in the UK recruited me to work on the first TrueType fonts for Windows 3.1. This was a time when computer screens were monochrome and had much lower resolution than what we have today. This meant pixels were quite visible to the naked eye, so letterforms had to be edited for accuracy of shape and alignment. It was a laborious process, but each typeface at every size was an education in working to get the best results within a strict set of parameters.
I was ultimately hired by Monotype and opened an office in Palo Alto, California.
Eventually, you went from hinting typefaces to drawing typefaces?
Exactly. I was learning the typeface drawing tools of the day in my spare time, trying to implement the things I learned while studying fonts for engineering. I eventually hired a few additional people for hinting, the California office expanded, and I was managing a team doing hinting and drawing. It was very exciting as we took on projects focused on screen legibility and branding. I did the Segoe typeface for Microsoft’s UI and branding as well as a custom font family for the HP corporate spinoff, Agilent Technologies.
It sounds great, professionally. Why did you leave to start Ascender?
In 2004, not long after AgfaType and Monotype merged, a group of us left Monotype to form Ascender Corporation. For me, we’d become part of a big bureaucracy where there was more managing than doing. I wanted to draw typefaces, and my Ascender partners made that possible. We had a good relationship with Microsoft and were allowed to pitch font ideas for the new Xbox 360 product. Then Google came along, and we pitched ideas for the Droid fonts for the Android platform. That led to the behemoth Noto fonts project (“Noto” means no tofu – tofu being the empty rectangle that appears if your font is missing a character). In six years, we had grown so much that we either needed to expand aggressively or join a bigger company. Monotype wound up acquiring us, so we’d gone full circle.
Let’s do a quick run-through of some of your best-known projects. Start with Segoe.
Segoe was designed for Microsoft’s ClearType technology. We needed something that looked crisp and appealing in their newest user interface. I designed an approachable humanist style sans serif that would be comfortable to read on screen. The squared-off terminals helped reduce blur on the letter’s edges, and the x-height and width proportions are fairly generous. Then it expanded beyond the UI to all Microsoft packaging and branding. It went a long way in helping update their visual identity.
Aptos in progress
And then Droid?
Droid Sans and Serif were for the Android mobile platform. Starting with my initial designs, which I could only view on my Mac screen, engineers at Google would load them into hardware with detached OLED or LCD screens for testing. This was before a mobile handset had been designed. I’d adjust letters, they’d put it onto a circuit board, and we’d view the results. We strived for a foundational font family that could hold up on a variety of displays. The success of Droid led to the Noto family, which now provides fonts for hundreds of writing systems. It’s huge in scope and helps serve languages that struggle for a digital presence.
Another big brand: Toyota. I love your story about how you did not give them what they wanted but insisted on what they needed.
Yes, so Toyota’s brief to me included the phrase “We move people.” They also said they wanted a purely geometric design inspired by the Toyota logotype. But I said, “You can’t forget the ‘people’ part of their brand promise.” A purely mechanical-looking geometric alphabet does not suggest human ergonomics. The analogy I used was how humanist calligraphy flows from one letter to the next. A “C” based on a circle is static and self-contained, while one that opens up to the right directs the reader forward. The concept appealed to the art director and helped him view type in a very different way than simple geometric vectors. I incorporated slightly more organic curves and letterforms, which generally flowed more easily from one to the next. Their marketing tagline was “Go Places,” so they directed me to incorporate an arrow shape into the “G” for an even more obvious nod to motion. In the end, Toyota got something contemporary, without resorting to something fully geometric.
The best part of bespoke type design is steering clients to a more suitable form than they might have initially gravitated to.
Unilever, too, had that “We want purely geometric!” moment, right?
They did. Their corporate visuals had these swirling, complementary colors and shapes. I told them, “A super-rigid, Futura-style sans might be a good contrast with all these vibrant colors, but what about when they rely solely on type?” So, I added little touches—a slightly bulbous “a” with a tail referencing the graphic swirlies, a curved “l”, and curved stems. Subtle, but it breathed a little humanity into the geometry. Sometimes the best part of bespoke type design is steering clients to a more suitable form than they might have initially gravitated to.
What about Rocket Mortgage?
Rocket had a strong brand mark that involved rotating the “C” so that it became an “O.” They also loved geometric sans shapes. My job was to unify that logo quirk across the entire font family. I worked with the structure of the logo to get consistent angles on letters like “R,” “K,” and “M,” to harmonize the logotype. With the lowercase I bent shapes like the lowercase “t” so that it would look like it’s lifting up off the baseline. Again, I made sure those “perfect” geometric shapes retained a gentle personality. People are interacting with this brand digitally and might only eventually talk to a person, so the brand should have a human element to soften the digital experience.
The moment [kids] feel the impression and see their composition on paper, they invariably smile and often giggle at the sense of achievement.
Let’s circle back to letterpress. What does printing with metal and wood type bring to your design process?
It’s an entirely different mindset. When I’m typesetting by hand, I’m physically feeling how letters fit together. You notice how a lowercase “f” might lean into the next letter or how serifs butt up against each other. You become acutely aware of the tactile sense of space and proportion. That definitely informs work in digital design.
Also, the process of letterpress is gratifying: the steps to hand compose lines, locking up a form, applying ink to rollers, and feeling the impression of type into paper. After you print, you can say, “I made that – now let’s put everything back to begin a new project.” You go on to reuse those letters to make something completely different. I love teaching the process to people – kids especially. The moment they feel the impression and see their composition on paper, they invariably smile and often giggle at the sense of achievement.
You and I share a love of the outdoors. Mountain biking and mountaineering are big passions of yours. Does that feed into your design work?
Absolutely. Nobody stares at a computer for 12 hours without losing perspective. But when I’m out on a trail, I have to focus on the ride; I can’t be thinking about the details of work. It’s really a forced meditation – the breathing, the constant adjustment of body position. I come back with a new perspective on what I was working on. It might be getting unstuck from making a decision or seeing a design detail in a new light. By the time I’m back, I have more clarity about what I’m doing.
The stories behind typeface origins are fun for me, much like the inspirations behind music compositions or literature.
You eventually departed Monotype again and started your own foundry, Matteson Typographics. What excites you these days?
I’m revisiting older designs that never got fully released, plus revivals of wood type or lesser-known metal typefaces. I’m working on a blackletter revival of a Norwegian design called Fabritius. It’s from the early ’60s – barely used in printing, but it has beautiful Lombardic caps and lovely, decorative lowercase. I love these hidden-gem historical typefaces. Then I’ve just finished an original incised serif family called “Pier 52.” It has fine copperplate-like serifs similar to engraving and sign-painter traditions. I suppose being around boats a lot when I was younger tripped that aesthetic in me. The stories behind typeface origins are fun for me, much like the inspirations behind music compositions or literature.
It sounds like you have multiple irons in the fire at all times.
Always have, always will. Sometimes I do a morning of drafting letterforms for a brand-new concept, then switch to finishing a revival in the afternoon. Or maybe I spend time writing lectures or printing in my studio. That’s a rhythm I enjoy.
Is there one common thread you think about when approaching all these different type projects?
I enjoy making typefaces because people will then use them to express themselves in their own way. I’m “making things that go on to make other things.” That resonates with me particularly because type is a tool for expressing visually what people are thinking. If I can facilitate the accuracy or poignancy of communication, then I’ve done my job.
Lucas Czarnecki is creative director at Type Network. After teaching the first-ever course on Typography and Graphic Design at the University of Virginia, he began a two-year letterpress printing apprenticeship at the Virginia Center of the Book. He then founded the Charlottesville Design Week—Virginia’s first design festival—and Type365—a typography blog read by thousands. While working under the name if it has words, Czarnecki presented at TypeCon, The Virginia Festival of the Book, Society of News Design, and TEDx. During one such conference, he met Roger Black and began writing and designing for TYPE Magazine, where he continues to moonlight.
All images courtesy of Steve Matteson and Type Network.
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