Luc(as) de Groot @ Gerhard Kassner (Monotype)
As the first speaker in the Hall on Friday morning, Berlin-based Dutch type designer Lucas de Groot guided us through his colorful world of letters. After the sweet introduction by TYPO moderator Sonja Knecht (who happens to be his wife), Lucas started his lecture at a pace as if he thought he would have too much material for the available time. However, he soon found a pleasant rhythm (while maintaining the energy), showing many examples of his typefaces in use, making the audience laugh with his charming sense of humor or simply with the absurdity of the examples. Not many people can say they use toilet paper with their own typeface embossed on it.
Subjects ranged from the history of his Thesis font family (from 580 to 8563 glyphs, from 8 to 27 styles, from 1994 to today), to his “grandparents” (“De Groot” is dutch for “The Great”). Several of those grandparents have typographic relevance, such as Charles the Great (Charlemagne), the instigator of the Carolingian minuscule, allowing for entertaining interludes.
Type Designer (Berlin)
Berlin-based Dutch type designer Luc(as) de Groot is best-known for his superfamily Thesis: TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix, TheAntiqua, with monospaced and even Arabic variants. But his repertoire is much wider; all of his typefaces offer an enormous range of possibilities, high functionality and friendly appearance. They became a subtle part of everyday life. In addition to creating corporate type for international companies including Sun Microsystems, Bell South, Heineken, Miele, Volkswagen and Volvo, Luc(as) has designed custom fonts for newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo, Le Monde, Metro, Taz, Freitag, Jungle World, and Der Spiegel. He developed two font families for Microsoft: monospaced font family Consolas, as a successor for Courier, and Calibri, the default typeface in MS Word.
Luc(as) is also a graphic designer, illustrator and master of many crafts. As a devoted type technician and hinting lover, he invented the Anisotropic Topology-Dependent Theory of Interpolation, amongst others, and contributes to tools and techniques. Many appreciate both his profound knowledge and his idiosyncrasies – a quest for extremes that lead Luc(as) to some of the narrowest, thinnest, wittiest and boldest typefaces around. Luc(as) de Groot runs his type foundry LucasFonts and design studio FontFabrik in Berlin; he teaches type design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany, and gives lectures and workshops around the world.
Extreme anything
Luc(as) de Groot @ Gerhard Kassner (Monotype) But the main theme of the talk was “extremes”. He showed extremely thin and extremely thick variations of his letterforms, literally going to the limits of font technology. Extreme amounts of glyphs. Extremely obscure glyph sets (“Coptic petite caps” anyone?). Extreme kerning. Extreme curves. Extreme proportions. Extreme everything. No wonder he sees a challenge in designing the “most difficult typeface in the world”: a hairline font so thin it is barely technically possible, as well as barely visible.
Lucas has an incredible output, and works in extremely different contexts. He and his studio LucasFonts create large utilitarian type families for corporations, magazines and newspapers, but also finds time for lighthearted typographical experiments. Developing his own techniques for casting large concrete letters, he’s a true typographical inventor and craftsman.
While he did not stress his work as a teacher (he’s a professor of type design in Potsdam), it is obvious he is an experienced visual “explainer”. His illustration of a complex multidimensional interpolation model is a piece of art all by itself, even though it is focussed on getting a complex subject across.
Delivering a talk full of character, dense with letters, theories, charts and jokes, Lucas left the audience giggling and satisfied.
lucasfonts.com
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