Frank E. Blokland is type designer (of, among other typefaces, DTL Documenta and DTL Haarlemmer), Senior Lecturer in type design at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague since 1987, and Professor and Research Fellow at the Plantin Institute of Typography, Antwerp, since 1995.

Blokland founded the Dutch Type Library in 1990 and a couple of years later he initiated and supervised the still ongoing development of tools for the professional font production, produced together with the Hamburg-based company URW Type foundry GmbH.

In October 2016 he successfully defended his PhD dissertation at Leiden University, which was the outcome of a research conducted in order to test the hypothesis that Gutenberg and his peers developed a standardized and even unitized system for the production of textura type, and that this system was extrapolated for the production of roman type in Renaissance Italy.

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