Scratched Letter

In 2003 I got a hold of a Wacom Dabler mouse pen for the first time. I tested the tool in Illustrator scratching within the outlines of a piece of text.

I started collecting all the different versions of the a,b,c... and piled them up into this alphabet:


By stacking 1 up to 200 different drawn versions of one letter, the letter gets thicker and more black.

By resizing the shape more details become visible.


I collected the sketches and made it into a type specimen book Letter Sketches.

I made a Letter Flip Book to zoom in on the details of the letter.

Stripe and Lead, samples

Hype Foundry

After playing around with handwritings for a while, I was taken by the fact that type can be easy and quick. I started printing outlines of existing typefaces, tracing them with markers or fineliners, scanned it and traced it. A nice trick for that time. I used it for the titles Reader Magazine (2002) and even other people started using these fun fonts.


I called the collection of typefaces 'The Hype Foundry' and also made a booklet with the font collection.

One of these typefaces was used Reader Magazine (2002, project by Michiel Schuurman and Hansje van Halem)

Quick Type

I really enjoyed the process of scanning, tracing and making letters in to a working typeface. For school assignments given by Gerard Unger I made a quite a few of these Quick Types. My goal at the time was to visualise the growth towards a better typeface within a whole type family. I was more interested in making it, than I was interested in making it look good. I liked carelessness and imperfections. I used these alphabets once, but that's too ugly to show.

Handwritings

After digitalizing my grandmothers handwriting I really got the hang of this little trick. I started digitalising the handwritings of my cousin, my roommate and my father. I was bored quite soon, and never really finished a good one.

Grandmother type

Just before leaving the KABK in The Hague, I was tought to work in Fontographer. This was a major freedom in playing around with type. The first time I used this new sense of freedom was for a Rietveld assignment. In 2001 Experimental Jetset asked us to make a fanzine. I digitalised my grandmothers handwriting for the design of a fanzine about her. It doesn't work really well as a typeface, but I still think it does work as a good design solution for the content. Funny thing was, my grandmother couldn't remember all the letters of the alphabet.