The Plantin Moretus Museum hosts the biggest collection of typographic artifacts originating from the 16th century. Fred Smeijers has been studying these artifacts for the past three decades from both a historical and a practical point of view. This multi-faceted approach is not uncommon to Smeijers – in his daily practice he cuts punches for type, makes matrices and hand-casts type, he designs digital type, runs a foundry, and shares his knowledge in his type design classes at HGB in Leipzig and t]m in The Hague. In this talk, Smeijers will briefly lift the veil of his “type forensics” workshop to reveal some conclusions he has come to lately. He will also raise new questions that resulted from his study of the artifacts and documents from the Plantin Moretus collection.
Keynote: Zooming in and zooming out
Fred Smeijers
Fred Smeijers is a Dutch type designer, teacher, researcher, and writer. Educated at the school of art in Arnhem, he worked as a typographic advisor to the reprographic company Océ, then became a founding member of the graphic design practice Quadraat, which provided the name for his first published typeface (FontFont, 1992). His distinctive typeface designs include Renard (TEFF), Nobel (DTL), Arnhem, Fresco, Sansa, Custodia, Ludwig, and Puncho (all first published by OurType, the font label that he co-founded and led as creative director until 2017), as well as custom type designs and lettering for Philips Electronics, Canon-Europe, Tom-Tom, Samsung, and Porsche. Smeijers’s first book, Counterpunch, was published by Hyphen Press in 1996, followed by a second edition in 2011 and translations into French, Japanese, and Portuguese. In 2001, Smeijers was awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for outstanding contributions to type design. In 2016, the Society of Typographic Aficionados awarded Smeijers the SOTA Typography Award. Smeijers is a research fellow at the Plantin Museum in Antwerp, professor of type design at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.