Petr van Blokland (born 1956, Gouda) is a Dutch graphic designer, software author and typeface designer who lives in

Delft Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, ...

Contributions to typeface technology

He has made numerous important contributions to the adoption of software in typeface design. He was a co-author of Ikarus M, the first typeface design software for Macintosh computers. Alongside his brother

Erik van Blokland Erik van Blokland (born 29 August 1967 in Gouda) 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 Netherlan ...

and

Just van Rossum Just van Rossum (born 1966 in Haarlem) is a Dutch typeface designer, software developer, and professor at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. He is the co-founder of design firm, LettError, along with Erik van Blokland. Just van Rossum is the ...

, he created RoboFOG, a system for writing scripts to streamline typeface design work in then market-dominating type design software Fontographer. RoboFOG (and its successor RoboFAB) spearheaded a technological revolution in type design revolving around the core technologies of RoboFOG, that is Python programming, the programming assets created with the software, and the ethos that the small group evangelised, "build your own tools". A technological movement began around this, revolving around the Type and Media masters course that the three all teach at. Petr co-founded TypeNetwork, an online typeface marketplace, with

Font Bureau The Font Bureau, Inc. or Font Bureau is a digital type foundry based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The foundry is one of the leading designers of typefaces, specializing in type designs for magazine and newspaper publishers. History ...

, David Berlow,

Roger Black Roger Anthony Black MBE (born 31 March 1966) is an English former athlete who competed internationally for Great Britain and England. During his athletics career, he won individual silver medals in the 400 metres sprint at both the Olympic Ga ...

and others, with the intention of creating a new model for type design, development and licensing.

Typeface design

Blokland has authored a number of typefaces, the most notable being the influential Proforma and its sibling Productus. Proforma, an oldstyle-serif typeface, started out as a commissioned typeface for Danish digital typesetting company Purup Electronics.

FontShop International FontShop International was an international manufacturer of digital typefaces (fonts), based in Berlin. It was one of the largest digital type foundries. The ''FontFont'' library of fonts contains designs by 160 type designers, among them renown ...

, while creating its ''100 best typefaces of all time'' list described it as "groundbreaking at the time for the way that it combined economy of space with good readability". The impact of the Proforma design was such that in 1988 Petr received the infrequently-awarded

Prix Charles Peignot The Prix Charles Peignot (Charles Peignot Prize) is a major award in typeface design, given "to a designer under the age of 35 who has made an outstanding contribution to type design". It is awarded irregularly, typically every three to five years, ...

for distinguished typographic achievement by a designer under 35. The companion sans-serif typeface, Productus, was published by Font Bureau in 2000.

References

External links

Fonts in Use
Living people Dutch typographers and type designers 1956 births {{authority control