Wikipedia entry (original) (raw)

FINALLY, all concerned parties have signed off on this entry. I ran the typographic details in front of leading designer David Berlow and both work and family details in front of Harry .
As soon as my IT consultant can get this up (There are about 40 pages of instructions on putting up Wiki entries..far more than my two college degrees and life experience can comprehend), It will be done. I hope that is this week.

The Entry:

Mike Parker (Michael Russell Parker born in London, 1929; moved to United States in 1942) American typographer and type designer. Parker is best known for his work as Director of Typographic Development at Mergenthaler Linotype Co. from 1959-1981.

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 and 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 Linotype 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 responsble for bringing in internationally known designers such as Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger and Herman Zapf. The result was a library that became the standard of the industry.

In 1981, Parker and Matthew Carter co-founded Bitstream Corporation, 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.

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.

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".

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.

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 collegue 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. Parker is currently completing a Type History account for the Font Bureau blog and tinkering with thoughts of other fonts.

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-P The Font Bureau, Inc.

PERSONAL

Parker's parents were Russell Johnson Parker (an American Explorer, Mining Engineer and senior Executive of Kennecott Copper Corporation)

and Mildred Grace Parker.

Parker holds two degrees from Yale

BA in Architecture 1951

MFA Graphic Arts School of Design 1956

Parker served in the US Army as Executive Officer of an Engineer Combat Company in Korea 1952-54

He was married twice.

Mary Elizabeth Hart 1955 - 1981 Three children:

Joanna Evans, Harry Parker and Patricia Parker.

Sibyl Masquelier 1992-2004 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.