Maurice Meilleur
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_Schrofer pattern screenprint
From Frederike Huygen, Jurriaan Schrofer: Graphic designer, pioneer of photo books, art director, art manager, environmental artist (2014)
 Jurriaan Schrofer made these silkscreen pattern prints in 1972, by which point in his career he was already absorbed in constructed-script designs and incorporating combinatoric and random methods in his work. It’s probably not an accident that the patterns are built of geometric elements that could be combined to make simplified glyphs in a Latin-alphabet script.
Courtesy Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam
 The prints are arrays of 144 tiles, each tile comprising four elements: arcs or linear angles, each in one of four orientations, set in a two by two square. There are twenty-four unique permutations of these elements. Since Schrofer wasn’t a mathematician and only rarely worked with computers, he worked out these permutations by hand.
    
Courtesy Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam
Courtesy Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam
 Looking at the plan below, we can see that Schrofer drew six sets of twenty-four numbered square slips on graph paper, three sets each in two colors, arranged them randomly (perhaps drawing them from a bag or box), and pasted them down to a substrate. He could ignore the colors and use the numbers to choose permutations of arcs or angles only; or he could assign each color to arcs or angles and know he’d have them equally and evenly distributed.
Courtesy Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam

Conceptually, the plan for the patterns is pretty straightforward. But while the geometric construction of the elements was relatively easy to do by hand with a compass, straightedge, and graph paper, a precise mathematical description of their shapes is a little more complex than might first appear to be the case. The arcs and angles are defined by gaps in larger circles and squares; those gaps are the same size as the difference between the circle’s diameter or the square’s side, on the one hand, and the size of the tile on the other. This takes a little geometry to describe properly in the code I wrote to recreate Schrofer’s patterns.
Courtesy Jurriaan Schrofer Archive, Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam
 The code (Python, working in DrawBot) incorporates that geometry and Schrofer’s manual combinatorics and random methods and generates versions of the patterns in all-arcs, all-angles, and evenly-mixed versions—complete with diagrams.