Maurice Meilleur
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_Schrofer, Les textes sociologiques covers
Courtesy the Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam
 Among the Mouton Publishers books for which Jurriaan Schrofer designed covers in the 1970s were those in a series of titles in sociology, anthropology, and social psychology, Les Textes Sociologiques. Above are specimens of covers in the series mounted for a 1974 show of Schrofer’s script designs at the now-defunct Museum Fodor in Amsterdam.

For this series Schrofer used a monocase, monospace script drawn in a 3 × 9 grid designspace. He systematically varied the ratios of the vertical and horizontal stroke weights to the respective dimensions of the counters to create glyphs of different proportions.

I built a variable font with two bidirectional axes, one for each of these ratios, to recreate and analyze Schrofer’s designs and covers. Default values of 0 set the ratio of strokes:counters 1:1. Positive axis values increase the relative size of the strokes; negative values, the size of the counters. The axes max out at ratios of 10:1 and 1:10. The diagram highlights the glyph where both ratios are 1:1.In the field Schrofer drew for the covers, horizontal stroke-to-counter ratios range from 1:3.5 to 3.5:1, top to bottom. The vertical stroke-to-counter ratios range from 1:5.5 to 5.5:1, left to right. The g in row 6, column 12 has the default horizontal and vertical ratios of 1:1.
Courtesy the Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam

Originally, I reverse-engineered Schrofer’s design and plan for the field from images of the covers. When I visited his archive in 2022, I found this plan that confirmed my analysis. (By the way: the field isn’t exactly square; it’s just a little narrower than it is tall. The ratio is about .991.)
The full gamut of the variable font’s proportions, with axes to their … maxes. (Don’t try making this in InDesign!)

(All images not otherwise credited were generated with code, in Python with DrawBot.)