Schrofer was soon afterwards approached to design the catalog for a 1963 exhibition on the interwar art and design journal i10 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Schrofer built the design around his script, which became the foundation for all the publicity materials for the show. (That’s Schrofer in front of his poster.)

Schrofer named his own design ’Sans Serious’. Its lack of originality didn’t disturb him—as he explained to Vonk and in LOM, designers working with geometric shapes in constrained design spaces were bound to find convergent solutions.

These posts will present Schrofer’s work both according to these schemas and in (very) roughly chronological order, with references as well to their appearances in Fodor and LOM. I’ll be sharing fonts I’ve built from code that reconstruct the design spaces, marks and forms, and rules for their combination in the designs, as well as images of Schrofer’s own sketches, diagrams, maquettes, and the designs in application.

I’ll disagree occasionally with Schrofer’s descriptions and assessments, and sometimes suggest different ways to imagine his work. But I hope these posts do more to emphasize Schrofer’s own key insights, not just into his designs but into conventional scripts, and writing generally: that letters are in the end are undefined shapes and meaningless signs. His insights point the way to deeper explorations of how humans capture meaning in systems of visual form.

Note that Albers parses the structure and process of making his letterforms in two different ways. The earlier version he describes as being built of combinations of ten basic forms; the later version, of just three simpler ones.

Note also the variations Albers explores with the second version. That designs can be parsed in different ways, and their parameters varied accordingly, are features of all Schrofer’s designs, and of constructed scripts generally.

Some program notes before I start: Unless otherwise stated, all fonts and diagrams are my own design, made with the kind support and permission of Schrofer’s surviving family. I anticipate some versions of the fonts becoming available publicly, though more than that I can’t yet say.

Images of Schrofer’s work and papers are my own or, again unless otherwise stated, courtesy of the special collections of the Allard Pierson Museum in the University of Amsterdam.

Schrofer’s design, a combination of squares and quarter-circles in a column grid, was—in his words—‘not that original at all’, similar to ‘alphabets made in the 1920s and 1930s’. He was thinking of Kombinationsschrift, a series of lettering designs by Josef Albers. Albers first developed his alphabet in 1923 as lettering for a metal and glass manufacturer in Offenburg; the final versions for letterpress he showed in the January 1931 issue of Bauhaus.

I aspire to post frequently but irregularly; I do have a day job, after all. I anticipate publishing this research—watch this space for details—and I’ll be working on an updated website this year to share the work in greater detail.

Feel free to share and boost these posts, but please contact me before citing me or them in your own research. Comments, questions, and criticisms are welcome and appreciated, and I’ll respond to them as I can.

**01**
In 1962 Jurriaan Schrofer began teaching courses at Amsterdam’s Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs (Institute for Applied Arts Education, renamed in 1968 the Gerrit Rietveld Academie). He asked fourth-year students in one of his classes to make an alphabet ‘with as few building blocks as possible’. Not satisfied with their results—as he told the story to Hans Vonk in Qwerty Magazine in 1990—he decided to try the assignment himself.

Finally, times being what they are and technology being what it is, my plans for structuring and sharing the posts and the work may change as these threads progress. I’ll make further program notes as might become warranted, if possible well in advance of any confusion or frustration—assuming readers invested enough in what I’m sharing to muster either reaction.

The world is on fire. In the scope of things Schrofer’s ‘strange little letters’ and my musings on them might not seem to many to amount to much. But good and thoughtful work, celebrated and pursued honestly, in the face of so much stupidity and cruelty can be its own form of activism. It might not be given to us change the world, but we can always serve the values that make life in that world worth living.