As I’ve been studying Jurriaan Schrofer’s constructed script designs, I’ve noticed that nearly all of them can be grouped around five fairly well-defined ‘centers of design gravity’, so to speak. The term I’ve come to use for these centers is ‘schemas’, and I’ve numbered them informed by both rough chronological order and Schrofer’s own cataloging of many of them inside the front and back covers of Letters op maat (1987).
As part of my own cataloging project of Schrofer’s scripts, I’ve been redrawing them (in many cases adding diagrams) with code to create digital fonts. I write Python scripts in the DrawBot environment and run them directly in the font-editing application Robofont.
Schema 01 involves scripts built on a column-grid design space, typically (but not exclusively) with square cells, sometimes subdivided, and sometimes alternating with smaller rectangular cells. Letterforms are created by placing a limited set of geometric shapes (squares, right triangles, circles or quarter-circles) in the cells. The columns are separated by gutters in which no marks or forms—or only minimal ones—appear. The gutters are essential to the letterforms by signaling counters and defining their sidebearings. The design space allows for ascenders and descenders, and for both majuscule and minuscule Latin letterforms, although Schrofer frequently didn’t make majuscules.
All photos courtesy of the Schrofer archive at the Allard Pierson Museum/University of Amsterdam unless noted otherwise.