MetaDesign After graduating from the
Royal Academy of Art in the Hague in 1988, Just van Rossum joined the Berlin design firm,
MetaDesign, as an intern while the company was still in its infancy. There, MetaDesign founder,
Erik Spiekermann, tasked Just with finishing a new typeface that Spiekermann had been working on. Impressed by the quality of his revisions, Spiekermann hired Just as a fulltime employee and credited him as a co-designer of the typeface, which was later published as ITC Officina Serif (EF) in 1990. During his stay at MetaDesign, Just's friend and fellow student, Erik van Blokland, was also hired as an intern after graduating in 1989. While working together in Berlin, the two interns began theorizing about potential innovations in typeface design, culminating in their joint publishing of an indie magazine in that same year titled: LettError. The magazine primarily consists of editorials denouncing the overreliance on
Bézier curves and the lack of innovation by typeface designers using
Postscript. The LettError magazine encapsulated the anarchic and rebellious vision of its editors, containing layered and misaligned prints as well as sardonic fake adverts. One such advert describes a fictitious typography, textbook poking fun at their current employer (Spiekermann) and prior academic upbringing, a phony review exclaiming: "At Last a Book About Typography NOT Written By Erik Spiekermann". The magazine proposed the idea of a "Random Font" which would produce glyphs with unexpected variations upon every print, as opposed to the uniformity provided by a typical typeface.
LettError Borrowing the name from their previously published magazine, Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland formed a business partnership, referring to themselves collectively as LettError. It is a serif typeface and the first proof of concept of a "Random Font" as theorized by the duo in 1989. The programming behind the typeface effectively subverts Postscript standard practices by replacing standard commands with an original function written by Just and Erik. In Postscript, the commands "lineto" and "curveto" are used to draw lines and curves from one point towards another, forming the shape of the final glyph. The team wrote a new function, "freakto", which was similar to "lineto", with the key difference that the destination point would be randomly generated somewhere near the intended location. FF Beowolf is a modification made to the roman typeface, Kwadraat, where uses of "lineto" and "curveto" are replaced with "freakto". The result is a jagged, angular typeface that appears different every time it is printed.
FF Hands Returning from a type conference in 1990, Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland had the idea for their follow up to the success of FF Beowolf, the FF Hands series. FF Hands consisted of two fonts developed by scanning and digitizing alphabets handwritten by each designer. Aptly, these typefaces were named FF Justlefthand and FF Erikrighthand, denoting the author of the original handwriting as well as their dominant hand. The FF Hands typefaces were the first fonts created by scanning handwriting. == Software ==