Mike Parker (typographer)

Mike Russell Parker (born London, 1929; moved to United States in 1942) is an American typographer and type designer. Parker is best known for his work as Director of Typographic Development at Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1959–1981.^[1]

Life and career

Parker holds two degrees from Yale: a BA in Architecture (1951) and an MFA from the Graphic Arts School of Design (1956).^{[citation needed]}

Parker served in the US Army as Executive Officer of an Engineer Combat Company in Korea 1952–54.^{[citation needed]}

After a Yale Design education, Parker was exposed firsthand to type history when he worked at the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp in 1958–59, a city block comprising the establishment of the leading sixteenth century printer & publisher. The Museum remains virtually unchanged to this day. Alvin Eisenman of Yale and his mentor Ray Nash of Dartmouth helped Parker obtain a grant from the Belgian American Educational Foundation, to spend 18 months working at the Museum, at the suggestion of Harry Carter, Matthew Carter’s father and noted type historian. Parker was charged with cataloging hundreds of sixteenth century type founders' artifacts, including punches, matrixes and molds. As he describes it, " The Plantin Museum is the biggest physical manifestation of history anywhere, of any time; everything is real."

He joined Mergenthaler Linotype Company 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.^[2]

In 1981, Parker and Matthew Carter co-founded Bitstream Inc, a type design company, in Cambridge, MA. 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.^[3]

After leaving Bitstream, due to differences with the other principles regarding the direction of the company, Parker co-founded The Company (la Societe Anonyme) in 1987 to market the fonts and software of Peter Karow of Hamburg, Germany while developing the most compact, cleanest and fastest intelligent rasterizer yet seen, Nimbus Q. His partners declined to risk their gains on ideas for assisted graphic design software and Nimbus Q was sold to LaserMaster, a printer company, in 1990.^{[citation needed]}

In 1990, Parker founded Pages Software with Victor Spindler, a veteran of film fonts. The Pages paradigm provided flexible design solutions to the editor of documents to be published for multiple readership on Internet or paper. The "editor" was anyone attempting to effectively format a document for multimedia. In the Pages paradigm the designer was present in the software offering most of the options that would be offered if the designer were present in fact. Each design model captured the principle options the designer would offer the editor at each level of the document as if the two were meeting. This set of choices was recognizable as the designer's "style".^{[citation needed]}

Pages was developed on the NextStep platform and was in the Beta stage of development when the Next Computer and the NextStep platform were discontinued in 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 Mergenthaler Linotype and Bitstream, Inc. 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. Parker is currently completing a type history account for the Font Bureau blog and tinkering with thoughts of other fonts.^{[citation needed]}

Mike was featured in the film Helvetica, a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture.^{[citation needed]} He wrote the Forward for the re-issue of Stanley Morison's Talley of Types, published by David Godine.

On April 6, 2011, Parker was awarded The Lifetime Achievement Medal of The Type Designers Club of New York. The TDC recognizes individuals in the typographic and graphic design communities who have excelled in the field of typography, whether in typeface design or type usage. The first recipient of the TDC Medal was Hermann Zapf in 1967. Mr. Parker will be the 24th recipient of the TDC Medal. In the past 44 years, the following professionals have been honored: R. Hunter Middleton, Dr. Robert Leslie, Frank Powers, Edward Rondthaler, Arnold Bank, Georg Trump, Paul Standard, Herb Lubalin (posthumously), Paul Rand, Aaron Burns, Bradbury Thompson, Adrian Frutiger, Jerry (Freeman) Craw, Ed Benguiat, Gene Federico, Lou Dorfsman, Matthew Carter, Rolling Stone magazine, Colin Brignall, Günter Gerhard Lange and Martin Solomon. The TDC Medal is not an annual award. The most recent TDC Medal was awarded to Paula Scher in 2006.

Timeline

• 1951: BA Architecture, Yale University
• 1952–54: US Army Korea
• 1956 MFA: Graphic School of Design, Yale University
• 1956–57: Typographic Project for I.M. Pei
• 1957–59: Plantin Moretus Museum, Antwerp
• 1959–81: Mergenthaler Linotype
• 1981–87: Bitstream Corporation
• 1987–89: The Company
• 1990–95: Pages Software, Inc.
• 1996–99: Design Intelligence, Inc.
• 2000–present: The Font Bureau, Inc.

Personal life

Parker's parents are Russell Johnston Parker (an American Explorer, Mining Engineer and senior Executive of Kennecott Copper Corporation) and Mildred Grace Parker.

Parker has been married twice. His first marriage was to Mary Elizabeth Hart (from 1955 to 1981), with whom he has three children: Joanna Evans, Harry Parker and Patricia Parker. His second was to Sibyl Masquelier (from 1992 to 2004: two step daughters: Phaedra Ruffalo and Ulrika Palmcrantz). Masquelier continued to be affiliated with Parker to defend the Pages patent 2005–2007. She is his authorized biographer.

Notes

1. ^ Font Bureau
2. ^ Financial Times The history of the Times New Roman typeface
3. ^ Font Bureau http://www.fontbureau.com/people/MikeParker/

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

References

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

• Biography of Mike Parker

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Name	Parker, Mike
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Date of birth	1929
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