Who would you think is the most read person in the world; Shakespeare, God, that lady who wrote the Harry Potter books?
Nope, it turns out to be Matthew Carter of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Never heard of him? Neither had I but the Babbage blog at The Economist has. Carter is the person who created the Georgia and Verdana fonts, which are now on practically every personal computer in existence. He created them both in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with Internet Explorer and bundled them into Windows and then issued them as a free download for all PCs.
Unlike most previous fonts, Georgia and Verdana were designed from scratch with monitor legibility in mind so they were a huge part of the reason for making the Web a runaway success. And the lack of innovation in print since his work is why he doesn't own a Kindle or iPad or other device just yet...
