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Fred Smeijers (Eindhoven, 1961) is a Dutch type designer, researcher and writer. [1] He was educated at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem in the early 1980s.
Smeijers is the creative director and co-founder of the typeface design and publishing company Type By. [2] In 2019 Smeijers was appointed Professor in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in the UK. [3]
After his graduation, Smeijers worked for Océ – a Dutch manufacturer of printing and copying hardware. Between 1986 and 1990, he worked at the Océ's industrial design department as a typographic advisor, designing typefaces for early laser printers. In the mid-1980s Smeijers started to develop an interest in the early 16th century technique of punchcutting. The insights he acquired from these experiments influence the way he designs typefaces. This became first apparent in his typeface FF Quadraat, a classic book typeface with interesting and innovative details. Other Smeijers' retail typefaces are FF Quadraat Sans, FF Quadraar Display, FF Quadraat Headliner, and FF Quadraat Mono (FontFont); Renard (The Enschedé Font Foundry), Nobel (co-designed with Andrea Fuchs, Dutch Type Library); Arnhem, Arnhem Display, Arnhem Fine, Fresco, Fresco Sans, Fresco Informal, Custodia, Sansa, Monitor, Ludwig, Puncho, Bery, Bery Roman, and Bery Tuscan (OurType); Haultin (based on the work of Pierre Haultin), Lyonnaise, Gantoise, [5] Sloan, Lambrusco. Smeijers has also designed custom typefaces and iconic logos for Philips , Canon-Europe, TomTom , Samsung , Porsche , among others. Public architectural lettering projects include the IJsei terminal [6] in Amsterdam (designed with Erik Vos, Het lab) for Benthem Crouwel Architects and city of Amsterdam.
Smeijers is a research fellow at Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Professor of Type Design at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, at the University of Reading, and at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague.
In 2000 Smeijers received the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize, awarded by The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague to honor innovations in typeface design and outstanding contribution to type education and writing. [7] In 2016, Smeijers received the Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). [8]
Smeijers was formerly a founding partner of OurType, [9] with entrepreneur Rudy Geeraerts and typographer Corina Cotorobai, [10] stepping down as the foundry's artistic director in 2017.
In 2019 Fred Smeijers and Corina Cotorobai partnered to establish a new font publishing label Type By.
Smeijers is the author of Counterpunch and Type Now, Hyphen Press, London.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
In Latin script typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Sometimes called normal, it is distinct from these two for its upright style and its simplicity.
In typography, a counter is the area of a letter that is entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form or a symbol. The stroke that creates such a space is known as a "bowl". Latin letters containing closed counters include A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, a, b, d, e, g, o, p, and q. Latin letters containing open counters include c, f, h, s etc. The digits 0, 4, 6, 8, and 9 also have counters. An aperture is the opening between an open counter and the outside of the letter.
Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale, the SoTA Typography Award, and repeated TDC2 awards from the Type Directors Club. His typefaces are among those most commonly used in books.
Pierre-Simon Fournier was a French mid-18th century punch-cutter, typefounder and typographic theoretician. He was both a collector and originator of types. Fournier's contributions to printing were his creation of initials and ornaments, his design of letters, and his standardization of type sizes. He worked in the rococo form, and designed typefaces including Fournier and Narcissus. He was known for incorporating ‘decorative typographic ornaments’ into his typefaces. Fournier's main accomplishment is that he ‘created a standardized measuring system that would revolutionize the typography industry forever’.
Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould shape to cast type. Cutting punches and casting type was the first step of traditional typesetting. The cutting of letter punches was a highly skilled craft requiring much patience and practice. Often the designer of the type would not be personally involved in the cutting.
FF Scala is an old-style serif typeface designed by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor in 1991 for the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The FF Scala font family was named for the Teatro alla Scala (1776–78) in Milan, Italy. Like many contemporary Dutch serif faces, FF Scala is not an academic revival of a single historic typeface but shows influences of several historic models. Similarities can be seen with William Addison Dwiggins' 1935 design for the typeface Electra in its clarity of form, and rhythmic, highly calligraphic italics. Eric Gill's 1931 typeface Joanna, with its old style armature but nearly square serifs, is also similar in its nearly mono-weighted stroke width.
Martin Majoor is a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both Arnhem, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland.
FontShop International was an international manufacturer of digital typefaces (fonts), based in Berlin. It was one of the largest digital type foundries.
Evert Bloemsma was a Dutch photographer, graphic designer, type designer, and art school educator.
Robert Granjon was a French punchcutter, a designer and creator of metal type, and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, and Rome. He is best known for having introduced the typeface style Civilité, for his many italic types and his fleuron designs, although he worked across all genres of typeface and alphabet across his long career.
In typography, a font superfamily or typeface superfamily is a font family containing fonts that fall into multiple classifications.
Les Grecs du roi are a celebrated and influential Greek alphabet typeface in the Greek minuscule style which was cut by the French punchcutter Claude Garamond between 1541 and 1550. Arthur Tilley calls the books printed from them "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist".
Christopher Burke is a British writer on typography and a typeface designer.
Erik van Blokland 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.
Fiona Ross is a British type designer, academic and linguist. Since 2003, she has worked at the University of Reading, where she is a Professor and Lecturer in Non-Latin Typeface Design. She has received awards such as the 2014 SoTA Typography Award and the 2018 TDC Medal.
Hendrik van den Keere was a punchcutter, or cutter of punches to make metal type, who lived in Ghent in modern Belgium.
Pierre Haultin was a French printer, publisher, punchcutter and typefounder.
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