Erik van Blokland

van Blokland in 2013

Erik van Blokland (born 29 August 1967, Gouda)[1] is a Dutch typeface designer, educator and computer programmer. He is the head of the Type[Media Master of Design program in Typeface Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in the Netherlands.[2]

Typeface design

Erik van Blokland collaborated with fellow Dutch typographer Just van Rossum to fuse programming and letterform design in a hack to the PostScript programming language. The result was the FF Beowolf typeface, the first dynamically generated typeface, which modified letterforms on the fly. Using a randomizing algorithm to generate different letter forms each time a letter was printed. FF Beowolf laid the foundation for the FontFont library. Erik and Just own and operate the Letterror type foundry.[3]

His typeface Trixie was an influence on grunge design as one of the earliest entries into the distressed type genre. It was famously used in the iconic logo for The X-files TV series.[4] Other typefaces of note include Eames Century Modern, a typeface based on the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames, designed with the co-operation of The Eames Office for House Industries and Federal, a highly intricate interpretation of the typography of bank notes, based on a study of siderography - the steel engraving process used for currency and old fashioned stocks.[5]

Programming

Erik has made several contributions to programming related to type design. He is the co-author of Unified Font Object (UFO),[6] the open, XML based file format for font data. He co-authored WOFF, the Web Open Font Format.[7] He developed the RoboFab type design extensions for Python with Just van Rossum and Tal Leming.[8] He's the author of Superpolator,[9] the application for interpolating font styles.

References

  1. ↑ Erik van Blokland at the Klingspor Meuseum website.
  2. ↑ http://typographics.com/people/erik-van-blokland
  3. ↑ An A-Z of Type Designers By Neil Macmillan Yale University Press, 2006
  4. ↑ "The Story :: FF Trixie, Typewriter Font". trixiefont.com.
  5. ↑ http://letteror.com/
  6. ↑ "Unified Font Object". unifiedfontobject.org.
  7. ↑ "Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries". Ars Technica.
  8. ↑ Stephen Coles. "An Introduction to RoboFab". Typographica.
  9. ↑ "Sp3". Sp3.

External links

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