Charter began when I was at Bitstream, and there was an issue about the amount of data required to store fonts. A serif typeface took twice as much data as a sans, because of all the curves and extra points. So I started doing Charter with a very simplified structure and a minimum number of curves, more straight-line segments, etc. It was very economical compared to, say, Times New Roman.

When finished, I proudly went to the head of engineering at Bitstream, but he said: oh, we don’t have a problem with that any longer, we now have more compact algorithms. I was left with a design solution to a nonexistent technical problem. But by that time I had gotten very interested in the idea of the simplified design. The technical raison d’etre had gone, but I persevered with it for completely different reasons, as I was now interested in the design for its own sake.

Matthew Carter.