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Date: 1995

Designer:
Matthew Carter

Foundry:
Carter and Cone Type

Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Current equivalent:
No direct modern equivalent exists

See also:
Mantinia and Sophia, by the same designer

Technologies:
Postscript

Famous for:
First typeface to offer user-defined slab serifs that double as ligatures.

Applications: Prestige and Private Press

Ubiquity:
Very rarely used

Category:
Sans Serif Titling Capitals

Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Sans and Slab Serif

Design history:
Walker was commissioned as the proprietary face of the Walker Arts Center. Carter responded with an entire system of a typeface – the first typeface to incorporate user-defined ‘snap-on’ serifs to make a family of four related variants. Walker is a set of titling capitals in a single monostroked weight that can be used as a sans serif or a slab serif, with serif positions occupying ‘over’, ‘under’ or ‘both’ positions relative to the height of the capitals. Designed to be set with tight spacing, these slab serifs work as ligatures between characters and radically affect the negative space around the letterforms. Walker owes much to Carter’s previous experience at making contextually variable letterforms in Devanagari, a Hindi typeface for Linotype.

profile 92

picture: Princeton Arch Press