Martin Majoor feature

This is the first of a series of feature articles on contemporary graphic and type designers, focusing on those who articulate their ideas in words as well as in their designs. The intention is to present the work and opinions of leading personalities not only through the eyes of an observer, but also in combination with their own views.

Martin Majoor has been a type designer since the mid-1980s. Around 1990 he designed the award-winning typeface family Scala. The Scala family has become extremely popular and is used worldwide. Since then, Majoor has designed two more typefaces: Telefont, exclusive to KPN Telecom, and Seria, distributed by FontShop.

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Andy Crewdson examines the motivations behind Majoor’s latest typeface in his article Seria’s motives: How Martin Majoor developed his ‘literary typeface’. In addition to this, Majoor published his views in the Argentinian magazine tipoGráfica. Backed by examples of history, Majoor sums up his aproaches to type design, and presents comprehensive relationships between Sans and Seriffed typefaces in his article titled My Type Design Philosophy. To make it more accessible to the English audience we are republishing it in this series.

Lastly, inspired by Majoor’s study, Peter Bilak interviewed Martin Majoor, and asked him questions based on the article. The interview completes the feature and presents the body of Majoor’s work in a larger context.