Frank E. Blokland (Leiden, 1959) is a type designer (of DTL Documenta [Sans], DTL Haarlemmer [Sans], and DTL VandenKeere, among others), Senior Lecturer in type design at KABK since 1987, and Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Plantin Institute of Typography, Antwerp, since 1995. He was a co-organizer of the Typography Summer School at the University of Antwerp and guest curator of the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp.
Blokland founded the Dutch Type Library in 1990. DTL is a pioneering company in the field of digital type, entering the computer font market in the industry’s very first decade. A couple of years later he initiated and supervised the still ongoing development of the DTL tools for professional font production under macOS, Windows, and Linux.
In October 2016 he successfully defended his PhD dissertation On the Origin of Patterning in Movable Latin Type: Renaissance Standardisation, Systematisation, and Unitisation of Textura and Roman Type at Leiden University. This publication was the outcome of a research conducted to test the hypothesis that the German inventor of movable Latin type Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400–1468) and his colleagues developed a highly standardized system for creating textura foundry type. In addition, this system was adapted for the production of roman type in Renaissance Italy. For this purpose, the humanistic handwriting was cast in predetermined proportions, arising from an intrinsic systematization in the written source models.
The research outcomes provided the basis for various software for applying customizable frameworks based on the patterns derived from the archetypal Renaissance type models. Some of these tools can, for example, be used to replace optical spacing completely or they can be applied additionally to spacing by eye. See also: www.lettermodel.org.
In possession of the Certificate Basic Qualification Didactic Competence and Examination (BKE).