TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:40:09 EST 2024

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ABOUT

Martin Majoor

Dutch type designer born in Baarn in 1960, who works in Arnhem and Warsaw. Showcase of his most popular typefaces. Type designs:

• His 1993 Scala text family (which includes both sans and serif sub-families, as well as goodies such as the fist font FF Scala Hands, 1998) is great and well-balanced---one of the best fist fonts ever made. Scala is in the style of W.A. Dwiggins's Electra.
• He designed Telefont List and Telefont Text for the Dutch phone company PTT Telekom in 1994. He writes: The 1994 design of the Dutch telephone book can partly be seen as a reaction to the iconic 1977 phonebook designed by the modernist Wim Crouwel with Jolijn van der Wouw. Crouwel's late-modernist design, featuring the typeface Univers in lowercase-only text, had been christened The New Ugly by Dutch writers. In the following years, the original Crouwel design had been watered down considerably, and by the early 1990s, its usability had reached an all-time low. When Jan Kees Schelvis and Martin Majoor began their drastically renewed design of the phonebook, they set themselves a list of strict requirements: a new typeface, a better hierarchy, improved usability, and paper-saving typography. Majoor was responsible for both the new typeface (later named Telefont) as well as the book's microtypography. In 2018, it was announced that the last telephone book had been published.
• He created Scala Jewels in 1997.
• FF Seria and FF Seria Sans (2000). These families received awards at the Bukvaraz 2001 competition.
• In 2004, he published FF Nexus Mix, FF Nexus Sans, FF Nexus Serif, and FF Nexus Typewriter.
• He started a project with Pascal Zoghbi on the development of Sada (2007), an Arabic companion of FF Seria. In 2009, Sada was renamed FF Seria Arabic and published by FontFont.
• In 2010, he started work on Questa Sans (a typeface with a special y). The Questa project is a type project of Jos Buivenga and Martin Majoor---Questa is a squarish Didot-like font that Jos originally had planned in one display style only. It turned out to be a perfect basis to apply upon Martin's type design philosophy about the form principle of serif and sans. Questa was finished in 2014 and now includes Questa Sans, Questa Serif, Questa Slab and Questa Grande. Finally, the Questa project became the Questa Foundry.
• His corporate typefaces include Deutsche Telekom.

Interview at Typotheque. MyFonts interview.

To understand Majoor, read his article My type design philosophy. At ATypI 2004 in Prague, he spoke about his experiences as a designer and type designer in Poland.

The text José Mendoza y Almeida (Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem, introduction by Jan Middendorp, 2010, Bibliothèque typographique) describes Mendoza's contributions to type design.

Majoor's Flickr page. Speaker at ATypI 2010 in Dublin. At ATypI 2018 in Antwerp, he spoke on the history of Telefont. His type design blog. Klingspor link. FontShop link.

MyFonts catalog. Adobe link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Martin Majoor
 [Designer info]
Fontspring link [Buy fonts]
Monotype link
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Dutch type design ⦿ Fists, pointing hands ⦿ Books on type design ⦿ Type blogs ⦿ Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿ Telephone directory typefaces ⦿