Erik van Blokland

Department head & core teacher at TypeMedia

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 is head of the Type and Media master department . He invented the TypeCooker sketching tool which challenges students to meet ridiculous requirements.

Van Blokland (1967) could not choose between type design and programming and decided to do both. His work includes randomfont Beowolf with Just van Rossum (FontFont, 1990, MoMA collection 2011), typewriter Trixie (FontFont 1991), banknote LTR Federal (1996, TDC 2002), Eames Century Modern (House Industries, 2009, TDC, Letter.2, 2011) and Action Condensed (Commercial Type, 2016).

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, with Tal Leming and Just van Rossum, and the W3C Web Open Font Format standard.

Van Blokland consults on type design tools, logos, lettering and typefaces, with clients including the Government of The Netherlands, HBO, Adidas, and Adobe. He lectures on tool development and researches subjects in optics, digitisation, drawing and responsive type.

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