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.
Of the five schemas, schema 03 lies behind the most conventional-looking designs in Schrofer’s work—certainly in their solid and outlined variations. The designs with their default parameters are built in a design space seven units from baseline to x-height with two-unit ascenders and descenders. Vertical strokes are two units wide, vertical counters one unit, and horizontal strokes one unit; horizontal counters can vary from glyph to glyph but are mainly two units wide—so, the horizontal ratio is the reverse of the verticals. In solid and outlined variations, corners joining horizontal and vertical strokes—there are no diagonal strokes—exterior to the letterforms can be left hard corners or chamfered by 45° diagonals or arcs. The depth of the chamfer could also vary. The default dot versions observe the same ratios with the dots arranged in a square grid, and chamfering happens by simply omitting a dot. It’s possible (with a couple exceptions among the glyphs) to imagine the outline and solid variations as the dot versions wrapped by continuous paths and then filled or left open.
The most typical glyphs in variations of this schema were Latin minuscule forms, though he did draw majuscules from time to time, and at least once tried a set of monocase designs (along with extensive diacritics, which normally were not part of Schrofer’s repertoire of glyphs).
Schrofer varied the designs further by changing the whole-number ratios of the strokes to counters. Typically ratios were consistent across the design space, but he tried some experiments with a variation from this schema for the mark for Rotaform where vertical strokes were not all the same dimensions (with these he tried some subtle dimensional projection as well).
Occasionally Schrofer would also explore dimensional projection with this design, with results similar to those he got with designs from schema 02. More often variations of dimensional parameters were planar rather than volumetric, though there are some examples of the latter.
All photos courtesy of the Schrofer archive at the Allard Pierson Museum/University of Amsterdam unless noted otherwise.