Matthew Butterick

Matthew Coffin Butterick (born November 15, 1970) is an American typographer, lawyer, writer, and computer programmer. He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his book Typography for Lawyers, which started as a website in 2008 based on his experience as a practicing attorney. He has worked for The Font Bureau and founded his own website design company, Atomic Vision (purchased by Red Hat in 1999). Expanding Typography for Lawyers, Butterick published Practical Typography as a "web-based book" in July 2013.

Butterick graduated with a BA in visual and environmental studies from Harvard University.

As of November 2023, Butterick is serving as co-counsel in multiple class action lawsuits against AI companies GitHub and OpenAI (for GitHub Copilot), Stability AI (for Stable Diffusion), Midjourney, and DeviantArt.

Typefaces

Butterick's typeface designs include:

For Font Bureau Wessex (1993), transitional text serif inspired by Bulmer and Caledonia Herald Gothic (1993), a bevelled sans-serif Berlin Sans (1994, part), a flared sans-serif based on Bernhard Negro Hermes (1995), a blocky sans-serif loosely inspired by Berthold Block Alix, a typewriter font

Self-released

Equity, an updating of the 1930s body text serif design Ehrhardt. Features weights designed to suit different types of paper and printers and correctly letter-spaced small caps characters. Concourse, loosely inspired by Dwiggins’ geometric sans-serif design Metro. Features stylistic alternates and small caps. Triplicate, a monospaced slab serif design inspired by typewriter fonts such as the default face used in the IBM Selectric. Essentially a further development of Alix, with more variants including a proportional version and a style designed specifically for displaying code. Advocate, a caps-only slab and sans serif design. Reminiscent of mid-century American college sports team lettering, corporate logos and Bank Gothic. Somewhat resembles an expansion of Herald Gothic. Heliotrope, an attempt to merge the characteristics of serif and sans serif fonts into a single typeface. It draws loose inspiration from typefaces such as Optima and Albertus.