Erik van Blokland (born 1967) could not choose between type design and programming and decided to do both. His work includes randomfont Beowolf¹ (1990, MoMA collection 2011), typewriter Trixie (1991), banknote LTR Federal (1996, TDC 2002) and Eames Century Modern (2009, TDC, Letter.2, 2011). For many years he has focused on the technical aspects of type design and developed, among other things, the acclaimed type interpolation tools MutatorMath and Superpolator. Erik co-authored the Unified Font Object (UFO) specification and the W3C Web Open Font Format standard². He is also co-organizer of the triannual Robothon Type & Technology conference³. Van Blokland is a 1989 graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK). He returned in 1999 as a faculty member and teaches at the Type and Media master department. He invented the TypeCooker sketching tool which challenges students to meet ridiculous requirements. Van Blokland consults on type design tools, logos, lettering and typefaces, with clients including The Government of The Netherlands, Adidas, and Adobe. He can talk endlessly about ancient digital font formats and currently dabbles in research projects on optics, digitisation, drawing and responsive type.
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¹ with Just van Rossum
² with Tal Leming
³ with Paul van der Laan
