Early life Majoor was born in 1960 in the town of
Baarn, in the
Dutch province of
Utrecht. Seria is a book face with irregular details. FF Seria Arabic (2009), a complimentary
Naskh-style
Arabic 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 product. It has serif, sans-serif,
slab serif (‘Mix’), and
monospaced variants. OpenType feature support includes small caps in all weights, text figures,
tabular figures,
ligatures, and two sets of
swash characters. In 2006 the FF Nexus family won the first prize at the
Creative Review 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 (AIGA) in New York (1995). For this book Majoor was the first to use the digital version of
Jan van Krimpen’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. From 1999 until 2010 Majoor was the graphic designer for the
Warsaw Autumn Festival, the largest international Polish festival of
contemporary music. 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), Stuttgart (
Merz Akademie) and Warsaw. His type designs were exhibited in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, New York (
Cooper Union), Paris, London, Manchester, Berlin, Helsinki and Barcelona. ==Awards==