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). 

Setting trends; setting type

Remember when the word ‘trendy’ was, well, trendy? Yet now it is the kiss of death for anything purporting to be modern, innovative, or contemporary — used by people trying desperately to sound ‘cutting edge’ (is this the replacement for ‘trendy’?).

We are all constantly bombarded with change, software updates, new ‘rules’, and fashionable terms. We are urged to keep moving with the times, or risk the infamy caused by using an outdated word to mean ‘up to date’.

This brings me, rather circuitously, to the knotty issue of the number of spaces that should be used after a full stop in normal text. When editors receive a document with double spaces after full stops (or worse!), we tend to sigh and resignedly bring up the Search and Replace function. (But we never use the Search and Replace All option: we’ve all clicked this once in a burst of optimism, with disastrous results.)

The Heraclitean River blog addresses this question comprehensively in its essay here — but leaves editors mumbling into their (metaphorical) beards. In changing times we all tend to accept reasoning when it is backed up by enough people who agree with us. We’re not joining the Flat Earth Society, but it may be time for us to be a little more flexible about the thorny spacing issue.

By Corinna Lines

To serif or not to serif? That is not the question!

Do you need to decide on a font to use for a publication or for your organisation? Don’t limit your discussions to whether you should choose serif or sans serif. (A serif is a fine line finishing the main strokes of a letter, such as at the top and bottom of a Y.)

Several factors affect legibility and readability, and a much broader range of fonts are now available to organisations than ever in the past. Factors include point size, x-height, leading, character spacing, alignment, and typestyles that can affect legibility and readability of type.

Because of this variety of factors, it is very difficult to design a research study that gives a definitive conclusion on such a fundamental issue as ‘serif’ or ‘sans serif’. Indeed, in a literature review of readability research I did some years ago, I found strong research-based opinions for both extremes, plus ‘it doesn’t matter’ in the middle.

This is a good literature review of over 50 empirical studies.

In this study, the researcher made interesting discoveries about the impact of point size, and gives reasons for preferring sans-serif faces for online publication.

Wheildon’s ‘Type and Layout’, published in 1995, and based on research done in Australia, has some interesting findings. I wrote an article on it at the time, a rewritten version of which is still on the web.

Wheildon is a strong supporter of serif fonts in print, but his research has been criticised for using a less legible font as his basis. However, his conclusions on line length and line spacing are strongly supported by researchers across the entire spectrum of opinion.