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 with code (in many cases adding diagrams) to create digital fonts. I write Python scripts in the DrawBot environment and run them directly in the font-editing application Robofont.
Unlike schema 01, schema 02’s design space is a more conventional rectangular grid without gutters. But like schema 01, the boundaries of the grid cells, once defined, are inviolable; letterforms have to respect them, so their outlines are built around rectangles with no diagonals or curves. Designs in the schema can follow conventional minuscule(/majuscule) forms with a baseline and ascender(/caps)/descender lines, or they can be monocase. One parameter is the glyph width. Designs from this schema that adopt more conventional case forms have proportional widths, albeit ones measured in integer units of vertical strokes and counters—the lowercase i will be one vertical stroke and one counter (split between left and right sidebearings) wide; the lowercase n will be two strokes and counters; the lowercase m, three. Designs in monocase are monospaced: all glyphs are two vertical strokes and two counters wide (again including their sidebearings). The rule for these variations, at least as Schrofer deployed them, also seemed to require that glyphs occupy the entire height of the design space.
Further variations from this schema concern the proportions of vertical and horizontal strokes and spaces. The default (most common) ratios are 1:1 in both directions, so that the dimensions of the design space are 3 × 9 grid units (two vertical strokes and one counter; five horizontal strokes and four counters). For monocase variations the baseline is at the bottom of the design space; for proportional/lowercase variations there are generally five units (three strokes and two counters) between the baseline and midline, with ascenders(/cap lines) and descenders of two units (one counter and one stroke) apiece. The ratios can be varied in both directions.
All photos courtesy of the Schrofer archive at the Allard Pierson Museum/University of Amsterdam unless noted otherwise.