CRT Gothic was designed to survive distortion of width or slant on the Linotype 505, a typesetter that used a cathode ray tube for imaging. The result was that a single physical font was needed for multiple styles. Like many of his typefaces designed to solve specific technical problems, CRT Gothic was made obsolete by new typesetting technology, but its design survived to be released as a digital type family by Linotype.

Matthew’s first purely digital typeface was the two-year project of Bell Centennial, a new type family for AT&T, the company that produced almost all the American telephone books. It was made to replace the previous phonebook face, Bell Gothic, a metal Linotype family. The challenge was designing size-specific fonts that would save space and costs, and be readable after being printed on very cheap paper on high-speed presses.

By the early 1990s, Matthew was designing Georgia and Verdana, the first finely crafted typefaces for on-screen reading, which became the default fonts on the web. 

In 2018, Microsoft released his Sitka type family, a ground-breaking exercise in designing a typeface for reading, based on repeated readability tests and design iterations, with six optical sizes. 

A year later, in 2019, Morisawa released his extensive type superfamily, Role, the first extensive Latin typeface from the prominent Japanese type foundry. While Matthew has assembled many teams to produce big type families, for Role he used his pedagogical experience to teach four designers from Japan how to deal with the challenges that surround a giant project in – for them – a foreign script.  The result contains serif, sans, slab, and round subfamilies in nine weights and three optical sizes.