Mike's Obituary

Mike Parker, iconic typographic expert, died on February 23, 2014 from complications of stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease in Maine Medical Center. For the last several years he lived in Oceanview at Falmouth and finally, Hawthorne House in Freeport, Maine.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Patricia Parker, RN.

He was born in London, England on May 1, 1929 to Russell Johnston Parker and Mildred Grace Best Parker. His family came to America in 1942. Russell Parker, then in senior management at Kennecott Copper, was killed in the bombing of a Canadian airliner in 1949, an event that forever affected Parker’s life. Parker left his undergraduate studies at Yale to serve the US Army during the Korean War.

After returning to Yale (for both his degrees in Design), Parker was mentored by Alvin Eisenman, Director of Yale's School of Design, for his MFA.

He plunged into the history of typography immediately upon graduation. He was hired by the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, through a grant from the Belgium-American Foundation, to re-categorize sixteenth century matrices, dies, and equipment that had been hidden during WW II after German V2rockets hit the building in 1944.

In 1959, he joined Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Under his leadership over 1,000 typefaces, includingHelvetica, were added to the library making them available wherever Linotype equipment was in use, including complete Hebrew and Greek scripts. Parker was responsible for bringing in internationally known designers such as Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger andHermann Zapf. The result was a library that became the standard of the industry.

In 1981, Parker and Matthew Carter co-foundedBitstream Inc, a type design company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bitstream 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.

Parker was interviewed in the film Helvetica (2007), a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. He wrote the introduction for the 1999 re-issue of Stanley Morison'sA Tally of Types (1953).

In 1990, Parker founded Pages Software. 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. 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.  Parker licensed the Pages patent to Design Intelligence in Seattle (bought by Microsoft) and joined the company as an in-house consultant. 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. Bruce Webster, Chief Design Engineer for Pages Software, said, "Mike pioneered both the concept and the technical details of design-oriented desktop publishing, securing a patent in the process."

In 1994, Parker published evidence that the design of Times New Roman, credited to Stanley Morison in 1931, was based on William 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 colleague 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 by William Starling Burgess. A review of the Starling font was the subject of a featured article in the Financial Times in August, 2009.

In 2011, Mike was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Type Designers Club and in 2012, the Lifetime Achievement Award of The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA)

“Mike had a generous spirit,” said his second wife, Sibyl Masquelier. “ I cannot recall an instance when he refused a young graphic artist, font geek, or even an interested reader his time and talent. I especially loved when he would get letters, phone requests, and even the occasional visit from teenagers wanting him to talk about his classmate, Johnny Gunther, the teenage subject of John Gunther’s, Death Be Not Proud. For decades, the administration of Deerfield Academy would refer all such requests to Mike. He never allowed his interviewers to leave without giving them a brief, or not-so-brief, history of the development of printing- after all, Mike was the Font God.”

Parker leaves behind: his three children, Joanna Evans (Michael) of Belfast, Maine, Harry Parker (Annie Lawson) of Somerville, MA, and Patricia Parker (William Comeaux) of Conway, MA; six grandchildren, Miles and Dylan Evans, Clay and Reed Parker, and Emily and Evan Comeaux; his brother, Patrick Parker (Sally) of Sacramento, CA; his sister, Ann Parker Neal of North Brookfield, MA; his lifelong friend, Gillett Griffin of Princeton, NJ; his former wives, Mary Elizabeth Hart Parker of Northampton, MA and Sibyl Masquelier of Cape Elizabeth; and, his stepdaughters, Phaedra Ruffalo of Chicago and Ulrika Palmcrantz of Stockholm, Sweden.

The family is planning a Celebration of Life Memorial in the summer.