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.
Schema 04 is the one Schrofer explored the least often in his script designs. In Letters op maat he wrote that the idea was to make ‘as economical as possible letters in a 20-rectangle plane’. But there are two versions of the script in his materials and published work, one with the design space’s x-height divided into 4 sections with 2-section ascenders and descenders—so, 16 rectangles; and one with an 8-section x-height—24 rectangles. And in any event, the design is proportional with three widths, like the designs in schemas 01 and 03, so the design space would really be 24 and 36 rectangles respectively, to accommodate the wider glyphs.
The formal concept seems to be letterforms with a default square baseline to x-height region, halved for the i and j and 1, and half again as wide for the m and w; then with just enough rectangles added above and below to allow for the full letterforms. The letterforms themselves are defined by gaps along specific positions between the rectangles, when Schrofer was treating the design space like a solid surface with outlines cut into it; and by lines drawn between those positions, when Schrofer was treating the letterform like an outline drawn in the space.
All photos courtesy of the Schrofer archive at the Allard Pierson Museum/University of Amsterdam unless noted otherwise.