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 05, by contrast to 04, was one that Schrofer returned to again and again in the 1960s and 70s. There are so many iterations and subtle variations of scripts in this schema that my survey of them is still underway.
Generally, the design space for scripts in this schema is a square, a 3 × 3 or 5 × 5 array of nodes that define the start and end points of the strokes and counters of the letterforms. Because of the shape of the space, the designs are monocase (mixing conventional majuscule and minuscule letterforms) and monospaced. Variations include changing the methods of drawing the strokes, including outline/inline variations and the proportions of the different partial strokes. In one case (with no produced applications I’ve been yet able to find) Schrofer relaxed the space constraint to 3 × 5 and drew minuscule letterforms with ascenders and descenders. In another variation Schrofer explored varying the positions of the nodes along with the weight of the strokes.
All photos courtesy of the Schrofer archive at the Allard Pierson Museum/University of Amsterdam unless noted otherwise.