Martin Majoor (born 14 October 1960) is a Dutch

type design Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below. A typeface differs from other modes of graphic production su ...

er and

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both

Arnhem Arnhem ( or ; german: Arnheim; South Guelderish: ''Èrnem'') is a city and municipality situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands about 55 km south east of Utrecht. It is the capital of the province of Gelderland, located on both banks of ...

, Netherlands, and

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

, Poland.

Biography

Early life

Majoor was born in 1960 in the town of

Baarn Baarn () is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, near Hilversum in the province of Utrecht. The municipality of Baarn The municipality of Baarn consists of the following towns: Baarn, Eembrugge, Lage Vuursche. The town of Baarn Ba ...

, in the Dutch province of

Utrecht Utrecht ( , , ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city and a List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, pro ...

Education

Majoor enrolled at the then (Academy of Fine Arts,

), now part of ArtEZ University of the Arts, in 1980. He graduated in 1986. For a student placement, Majoor went to

URW Type Foundry URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...

in 1984. He used their Ikarus system to design a typeface named , which was never released.

Early work

In 1986, Majoor joined the research department of Océ and investigated fonts for use on

computer monitor A computer monitor is an output device that displays information in pictorial or textual form. A discrete monitor comprises a visual display, support electronics, power supply, housing, electrical connectors, and external user controls. The di ...

s. He also researched fonts for

laser printing Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a "drum" to d ...

for

Bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

. In 1988, Majoor became a graphic designer for the

Muziekcentrum Vredenburg Muziekcentrum Vredenburg was a music venue in Utrecht, Netherlands with a capacity of 5,000 people. It was designed by Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger. The venue hosted concerts by many famous artists, spanning many different genres. The old bu ...

, where he designed concert programmes. Frustration with limited availability of professional fonts on the institution's

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

computers led him to develop his own font, Scala.

Font designs

FF Scala and FF Scala Sans

In 1991,

FontShop International FontShop International was an international manufacturer of digital typefaces (fonts), based in Berlin. It was one of the largest digital type foundries. The ''FontFont'' library of fonts contains designs by 160 type designers, among them renowne ...

released Scala as

FF Scala FF Scala is an old-style serif typeface designed by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor in 1991 for the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The FF Scala font family was named for the Teatro alla Scala (1776–78) in Milan, ...

, the first ‘serious’ text face in its FontFont library. Scala expanded to a

superfamily SUPERFAMILY is a database and search platform of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes. It classifies amino acid sequences into known structural domains, especially into SCOP superfamilies. Domains are functional, str ...

providing both

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

and

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

faces with

FF Scala Sans FF Scala Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Dutch designer Martin Majoor in 1993 for the Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It was designed as a companion to Majoor's earlier serif old style typeface FF Scala, d ...

, released in 1993. Both have sold well since their introduction.FF Scala Sans was expanded with new weights and condensed versions in 1998. The family was supplemented with decorative capitals (FF Scala Jewels) in 1996. Several

index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

symbols were also added as FF Scala Hands, from a 1933 design by Bruce Rogers.

Telefont

In 1994, Majoor redesigned the Dutch

telephone directory A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization tha ...

for PTT Telecom (now

KPN KPN (in full Koninklijke KPN N.V., also Royal KPN N.V.) is a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. History Un ...

) alongside Jan Kees Schelvis. For this he created a new typeface named Telefont, with digitization assistance by

Fred Smeijers Fred Smeijers ( Eindhoven, 1961) is a Dutch type designer, researcher and writer, educated at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem in the early 1980s. Smeijers is the creative director and co-founder of the typeface design and publis ...

. Telefont List was designed for computer-generated listings, while Telefont Text provides

small caps In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...

and

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

for use in the directory's introductory material.

FF Seria

FF Seria is Majoor's second superfamily, released in 2000. Seria is a book face with irregular details. FF Seria Arabic (2009), a complimentary Naskh-style

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

font in four weights for display and text use, was designed by Pascal Zoghbi. It was based on Sada (2007), designed by Zoghbi with Majoor as part of the Typographic Matchmaking project.

FF Nexus

Majoor started on an alternative version of Seria, but this became a larger project. The result was released in 2004 as FF , Majoor's third superfamily and FontFont's first

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...

product. It has serif, sans-serif,

slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

(‘Mix’), and

monospaced A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spac ...

variants. OpenType feature support includes small caps in all weights, text figures,

tabular figures A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

, ligatures, and two sets of

swash Swash, or forewash in geography, is a turbulent layer of water that washes up on the beach after an incoming wave has broken. The swash action can move beach materials up and down the beach, which results in the cross-shore sediment exchange. T ...

characters. In 2006 the FF Nexus family won the first prize at the

Creative Review ''Creative Review'' is a bimonthly print magazine and website. The magazine focuses on commercial creativity, covering design, advertising, photography, branding, digital products, film, and gaming. The magazine is published bimonthly in print and ...

Type Design Awards, in the category Text Families.

Questa

In 2014, Majoor released Questa, a Didone font and sans-serif derivative in collaboration with Jos Buivenga.

Book design

Besides working as a type designer Martin Majoor has always worked as a book typographer and graphic designer. "It is my conviction that you cannot be a good type designer if you are not a book typographer." He designed several books for Dutch publishers such as Bunge, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, L.J. Veen, Vrij Geestesleven and Elsevier. Three times his book designs were chosen among the Best Dutch Book Designs, especially for its inside book typography, rather than for its covers. These books included ''Adieu Aesthetics & Beautiful Pages!'' (Adieu æsthetica & mooie pagina's!’), published in 1995 as the catalogue for the exhibition ‘The Aesthetic World of Jan van Krimpen, Book Designer and Typographer’ in the Museum of the Book/Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague and in the

American Institute of Graphic Arts The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) is a professional organization for design. Its members practice all forms of communication design, including graphic design, typography, interaction design, user experience, branding and identity. T ...

(AIGA) in New York (1995). For this book Majoor was the first to use the digital version of

Jan van Krimpen Jan, JaN or JAN may refer to: Acronyms * Jackson, Mississippi (Amtrak station), US, Amtrak station code JAN * Jackson-Evers International Airport, Mississippi, US, IATA code * Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN), a Syrian militant group * Japanese Article Numb ...

’s typeface Romanée (originally cut in 1928 for the Joh. Enschedé typefoundry), which in 1991 had been digitized by Peter Mattias Noordzij and Fred Smeijers for incorporation into the Enschedé Font Foundry (TEFF). In 2010, together with the French teacher Sebastien Morlighem, he wrote a book on the works of the French type designer José Mendoza y Almeida.Martin Majoor, Sébastien Morlighem, Jan Middendorp (intr.) (2010) ''José Mendoza y Almeida''. Paris: Ypsilon.éditeur, Bibliothèque Typographique. . From 1999 until 2010 Majoor was the graphic designer for the

Warsaw Autumn Festival Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is official ...

, the largest international Polish festival of

contemporary music Contemporary classical music is classical music composed close to the present day. At the beginning of the 21st century, it commonly referred to the post-1945 modern forms of post-tonal music after the death of Anton Webern, and included serial ...

. The programme books were set in Majoor’s own typeface Seria.

Teaching and speaking

From 1990 to 1995, Majoor taught typography at the Schools of Fine Arts in Arnhem and Breda. He wrote articles for magazines like Items, ''Eye'' magazine, 2+3D and tpG tipoGráfica. He lectured at ATypI/Typelab conferences in Budapest, Antwerp, Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona, The Hague and Prague; at TypoBerlin (2002 and 2005); and during other type events in Lure-en-Provence (Rencontres internationales de Lure 1996), Leipzig (TypoTage 2004), Warsaw, Katowice, Stockholm, Hamburg, Caen, Vienna and Dortmund. He gave workshops in Amsterdam (

Gerrit Rietveld Academie The Gerrit Rietveld Academie, also known as Rietveld School of Art & Design and Rietveld Academy, is an art academy in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The academy was founded in 1924 and offers programs in fine arts and design. History In 1924, the I ...

), Stuttgart (Merz Akademie) and Warsaw. His type designs were exhibited in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, New York (

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

), Paris, London, Manchester, Berlin, Helsinki and Barcelona.

Awards

* 1993 - Encouragement Prize Graphic Design 1994. Amsterdam Arts Foundation, for the Scala family. * 1995 - Award ''Best Dutch Book Designs 1995'' for ‘Adieu Æsthetica & Mooie Pagina’s!’ about the life and work of Jan van Krimpen. * 2001 - Award ''International Typographic Awards'' in London for the Seria familie. * 2001 - Award ATypI Type Design Competition ''Bukva:raz!'' in Moscow for the Seria familie. * 2006 - Award ''Creative Review Type Design Award'' for the Nexus family in the category Text Families.

Bibliography

* Lupton, Ellen. ''Graphic Design and Typography in the Netherlands: A View of Recent Work.'' Princeton Architectural Press: 1992. . * Friedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . *

Bringhurst, Robert Robert Bringhurst Appointments to the Order of Canada (2013). (born 16 October 1946) is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote '' The El ...

. ''

The Elements of Typographic Style ''The Elements of Typographic Style'' is a book on typography and style by Canadian typographer, poet and translator Robert Bringhurst. Originally published in 1992 by Hartley & Marks Publishers, it was revised in 1996, 2001 (v2.4), 2002 (v2.5), ...

''. Hartley & Marks: 1992. . * Middendorp, Jan: ''Dutch Type'', 010 Publishers: 2004, * Lupton, Ellen. ''Thinking with Type: A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students.'' Princeton Architectural Press: 2004. . * Spiekermann, Erik; Middendorp, Jan: ''Made with FontFont'', Book Industry Services (BIS): 2006, * Thi Truong, Mai-Linh; Siebert, Jürgen; Spiekermann, Erik: ''

FontBook ''FontBook'' is a typeface compendium in hardback published by FSI FontShop International and edited by Erik Spiekermann, Jürgen Siebert, and Mai-Linh Thi Truong. Published in 1991, it has been revised four times, with the latest edition publish ...

– Digital Typeface Compendium'', FSI FontShop International: 2006, * Martin Majoor & Sébastien Morlighem, ''José Mendoza y Almeida'', bilingual edition French-English, Introduction by Jan Middendorp, 176 pages, 03/2010, .

References

External links

www.martinmajoor.com
Martin Majoor's official website
''FF Scala microsite''
A website fully dedicated to FF Scala

Interview by

Peter Biľak Peter Biľak (; born 1973 in Czechoslovakia) is a Slovak graphic and typeface designer, based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design; teaches typeface design at the postgraduate course Type ...

(2003)
''Seria’s motives: How Martin Majoor developed his ‘literary typeface’''
by Andy Crewdson (2002)
''FF Seria Arabic''
by Pascal Zohgbi (2009)
''Types and Characters: Martin Majoor''
Brochure by Nina Völlink (2007)
''Writing With Scala''
Typespecimen by Ellen Lupton (2005)
Martin Majoor
on identifont.com {{DEFAULTSORT:Majoor, Martin 1960 births Living people Dutch graphic designers People from Baarn Dutch typographers and type designers Book designers