Speaker Albert Jan Pool

Albert-Jan Pool was born July 9th, 1960 in Amsterdam. He studies in The Hague at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was one of the co­founders of Letters] a group of young Dutch type designers. Many of its members ( Frank Blokland, Petr van Blokland, Jelle Bosma, Luc(as) de Groot, Bart de Haas, Henk van Leyden, Peter-Matthias Noordzij and Marie­Cecile Noordzij-Pulles and Just van Rossum and Peter Verheul) have become well-known type designers. From 1987 to 1991 he was Type Director at Scangraphic in Germany. And from 1991 to 1994 he was the Manager of Type Design and Productin at URW in Hamburg. During this time he completed his type families URW Imperial, URW Linear, URW Mauritius. By January 1995 he started his own studio Dutch Design in Hamburg. He had been teaching type design at the Muthesius Hochschule in Kiel from 1995 to 1998 (as well as typography at the Hamburg Academy tor Marketing and Media). Together with type consultant Stefan Rogener of AdFinder GmbH and copywriter Ursula Packhauser he wrote and designed a both useful and provocative book on the effects of type on brand image entitled Branding with Type which has been published by Adobe Press. Dutch Desig fially merged into FarbTon Konzept + Design. The new company was co-founded in 1999 with Jorn lken, and Klaus Peter Staudinger, as well as with Birgit Hartmann who is also the mother of their daughter Pia Elina ( born 1999 ).