Typography Tuesday
ERIC VAN BLOKLAND & JUST VAN ROSSUM
This week we present two typefaces by Dutch designers Eric van Blokland (b. 1967) and Just van Rossum (b. 1966), co-founders of the design firm, LettError. Both studied at The Hague Royal Academy (KABK) and were influenced by Dutch typeface designer Gerrit Noordzij. After graduation, they worked in Berlin at Erik Spiekermann's MetaDesign. They founded LettError in 1989.
Both eschew traditional design approaches and rely on computer models and digital expression. As they say, "a font is a software instruction to a printer to perform a task." Together they designed the typeface Beowolf in 1990 and in 2002 van Blokland designed Kosmik, both of which are shown here. For Beowolf, they hacked Adobe's PostScript by adding a new function named "freakto," and the result was Times New Random, later renamed Beowolf, a typeface that changes while it is being printed. No two shapes are identical.
Kosmik is based on the hand-drawn letters van Blokland used in his comic strips. For this typeface, the designer used a new digital invention, the "flipperfont," a tiny program embedded in the font that ensures the printer randomly selects one of three available versions of each character.
These images come from our 2005 book Creative Type: A Sourcebook of Classic and Contemporary Letterforms by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, and Friedrich Friedl, and published by Thames & Hudson.
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