The face behind the font: Mike Russell Parker (1929-2014)

This is the first blog in Write’s occasional series Full Stop: blogs about people in our lifetime who made an impact on the world of plain language and design. If you think a person is worth remembering, feel free to comment your ideas.

Mike Russell Parker (1929-2014)

Classic style. Those two words epitomise Mike Russell Parker. 

Mike Russell Parker

Born in London on 1 May 1929, the typographer, type designer and print historian died on 23 February 2014 aged 84 in Portland, Maine, from complications of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. In this blog we acknowledge and remember the ‘face behind the font’.

Awarded a BA in architecture from Yale University in 1951, Mike Parker left to enlist in the US Army and served as Executive Officer of an Engineer Combat Company during the Korean War. He then re-entered Yale and in 1956 graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the university’s Graphic School of Design.

Building a library of typefaces

After several jobs, including working on a typographic project for I.M. Pei between 1956 and 1957, Parker joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1959. He later became its Director of Typography and attracted famous designers to create various typefaces. Wherever the company’s Linotype equipment was used, the library of typefaces followed.

That library became the industry standard, and Parker stayed at the company until 1981. That year, with Matthew Carter he co-founded Bitstream Inc, a type design company based in Cambridge, MA. Bitstream was in the right place at the right time as the use of digital design, desktop publishing and the PC exploded during the 1980s. After Bitstream, from 1987 Parker worked at a series of companies that included Pages Software Inc (1990–1995). When that company closed, he licensed the Pages patent to Design Intelligence, a company that Microsoft bought in 2000.

Between 2000 and 2014 Parker worked for Font Bureau. He continued to research and release new fonts including ‘Starling’ (in 2009), a Roman font with a matching italic series and based on the 1904 drawings of William Starling Burgess. 

During his life, Mike Parker helped dozens of young designers start their careers. He also helped to develop more than 1,100 typefaces. Helvetica was one.

Quote by thimble

Helvetica started life in 1957 as ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’, for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland. Parker oversaw Helvetica develop as a font published for the Linotype machines. The clean, ‘safe’ appearance of Helvetica made it an enticing typeface for company logos and signs. Today we see it everywhere.



A range of logos in Helvetica typeface

In 2011 Mike Parker received the TDC Medal from the Type Directors Club, an international organisation for those devoted to excellence in typography in all its forms. The TDC Medal is awarded to individuals and institutions that have made major contributions to the field of typography. One year later he won the 2012 SOTA Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados:

“Parker’s knowledge, passion, infectious enthusiasm, and incredible impact on the type industry were just some of the factors in making him the jury’s unanimous choice to receive SOTA’s 10th annual Typography Award.”

The art of clear, classic style

Mike Russell Parker was married to Mary Elizabeth Hart from 1955 to 1981 and to Sibyl Masquelier from 1992 to 2004. He also leaves behind one son, two daughters, and two step-daughters. As his health worsened, Masquelier became his caregiver.

As Masquelier told the Portland Press after Parker’s death:

"Mike ... wanted to create the clearest type because he wanted people to read. He felt type influenced the way we we read, the way we think and the way we act. Type design is a very exact science but it is also an art form.” 

In 2007 Mike Parker featured in Helvetica, a film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. In that film, he said of a Helvetica character:

"It is not a letter that's bent to shape; it's a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space." 

As Yves Peters comments:

"[Mike Parker’s] interview for Helvetica – The Movie merely hints at his formidable knowledge, enthusiasm and wit, and that constant twinkle in his eye was extremely infectious. The type world has lost one of its giants.”

Mike Parker’s family plans to hold a memorial service in the northern 2014 summer to celebrate his life.

Sources

Font Bureau website

Helvetica: A documentary film by Gary Hustwit: the full, unreleased interviews from Helvetica are due to be released in June 2014 in the book Helvetica/Objectified/Urbanized: The Complete Interviews.
 
‘Helvetica: How did one typeface conquer the world?’, BBC News Magazine Monitor, 1 March 2014.
 
Hoey, Dennis. ‘Feature obituary: Mike Parker, 84, legendary type designer, print historian‘, Portland Press Herald, 10 March 2014.
 
Hutchinson, Grant. ‘SOTA Honors Mike Parker with Typography Award’, TypeCon2012.
 
Landau, Elizabeth. ‘We’ve all read his work - - ‘Godfather’ of Helvetica font dies at 84’, CNN, 28 February 2014.

Masquelier, Sibyl. ‘Mike Parker: The Font God’, blogpost, 4 October 2010.
 
Peters, Yves. ‘Mike Parker Passes Away at 84’. The FontFeed

Rohrer, Finlo. 'Helvetica at 50’, BBC News Magazine, 9 May 2007.
 
Wikipedia profile of Mike Parker (page modification date: 3 March 2014).

Photo sources

Photo of Mike Parker
Photo of Helvetica logos
Helvetica quote: by thimble, posted to KodakGallery.com (closed on 2 July 2012; images now provided by Shutterfly). 

From our bookshelf: a printer’s ‘Bible’

Jack Ponting, Write’s client services co-ordinator, has loaned me a wonderful book on printing. You may remember he wrote a terrific blog recently about his days as a typesetter.

Read Jack’s blog

‘ Wonderful’ and ‘printing’ may seem an odd pairing to you. But I love typefaces and the art of picking the right one for the right use — strictly from an amateur’s perspective.

When he won the title of top linotype apprentice in 1973, Jack was given a reference book from the 1920s. He brought it in for us to look at. It has the snappy title The Composing Room. Book & Jobbing Composition. Machine Composition by John Southward. (Publisher and publishing date not known.)

If you love fonts and printing, you’ll glory in this book. Everything’s covered, from The Structural Requirements of the Printing Office (‘…Work of good quality is required to be produced with great expedition and at a low cost.’), to beautiful posters and business cards. With fonts in Hebrew, Greek, and for printing sheet music, to boot.

You won’t find this book in any modern library, though it’s probably sitting in a stackroom somewhere. But a good substitute may be Just My Type: a book about Fonts by Simon Garfield (New York: Gotham Books, 2011). Find out about the shocking life of Eric Gill (creator of Gill Sans, Write’s house font), and the role of a font in a presidential campaign. That book’s on our bookshelf as well.

Take a look at Just My Type on Amazon

Before toner — hot lead

Jack, our Client Services Co-ordinator, is no stranger to the written word. An article online has brought back memories of typesetting at the Wanganui Chronicle. He writes:

Memory of times past
With much enjoyment I read the Dominion Post article about the printing museum finding a new home. 

Take a look at the article on the Dominion Post website

In the article, Bill Nairn is pictured sitting at a typesetting machine (the erroneous caption on the website version refers to it as a printing press).

Setting slugs and dodging splashes
This Linotype machine enabled a character matrix, together with spacers that justified the line, to cast a ‘slug’ — a line of type. (That’s why these machines are called ‘linotypes’.) Each slug was created when a mixture that was mostly molten lead was forced into the mould, casting one line at a time.

The end result was rows of type that were assembled and inked. Paper was then placed on top and pressure applied to transfer the ink. Letterpress was born.

All Linotype operators have memories of ‘splashes’. These happened when the row of matrix were sent to the casting wheel and didn’t align with the mould. Skilled operators knew what was about to happen.

Down came the plunger squirting hot metal — not just over the machine, but also over any slow-moving operator. Health and safety was minimal in those days and the worst part was the time wasted clearing the metal from the Linotype. Usually 15 minutes and it was all go again. Fortunately the hot lead soon cooled, so you could peel it off your overalls like candle wax.

Real machines needed running repairs
Batteries of these machines lined the composing room of newspapers and commercial shops worldwide. Each required maintenance like any other machinery. Many moving parts such as cams, belts, slides, rails and the melting pots all needed attention to enable the machine to function best.

Labour intensive, each had its own character and a good operator produced millions of Ems and Ens of text during his time as an apprentice or a journeyman (not gender inclusive because it was very much a man’s trade).

Today most people understand that toner miraculously sticks to the paper, with no smudging, and copier problems are more about paper. Progress has brought us a long way.


Footnote: The first 12 of the 91 keys on the Linotype keyboard are etaoinshrdlu, a syndicate name I put on my weekly Golden Kiwi ticket. I never won a major prize, so no announcer ever had to try to pronounce it!