TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:50:48 EDT 2024

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ABOUT

Jurriaan Schrofer

Dutch Bauhaus era designer, b. Den Haag, 1926, d. Amsterdam, 1990, known for his photography book design and letterin projects. He drew some alphabets, one of which led James Mattison to create the digital stencil font Schrofer (2009). The Sans Serious family by John Skelton is also a revival.

Jan Middendorp writes in Dutch Type: Schrofer made several attempts to create complete typefaces---one of which was wittily called Sans Serious---but this was never his goal. "Is it necessary", he wrote, "to make complete alphabets with upper and lowercase, figures, diacritics and seriously adorned with a name, when the aim is merely a formal investigation into basic recipes". Schrofer's domain was never the design of typographic alphabets, to be used by other designers, but always the creation of letterforms "made to measure" (Letters op maat) as part of his own designs of---mainly---book covers and postage stamps. He created a rectangular alphabet as the basic element of his ever-changing covers---each based of the same grid but colored differently---for a series of scientific books, "Les textes sociologiques" from Mouton Publishers. He made sophisticated pixel-based letters, all drawn by hand, and experimented with photographic screens as a means of distinguishing simplified letterforms from the background. He created logotypes built from custom-made letterforms, based on rectangular grids. [...] In his booklet Letters op maat (Type made to measure, 1987), Schrofer presented many of his experimental alphabets from the 1960s and '70s. The booklet was part of a series of goodwill publications edited by Wim Crouwel for Lecturis Printers, Eindhoven.

In 2018, Ron Ruedisueli attempted to digitize all of Schrofer's alphabets in a special series at FontStruct called STF Letters Op Maat.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Jurriaan Schrofer
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Dutch type design ⦿ Stencil fonts ⦿ Bauhaus and type design ⦿