In their presentation Blokland and his former student Lukas Schneider (graduated with highest distinction from the Expert Class Type Design in Antwerp) aimed to prove how these archetypal patterns could even be used to improve digital type production today by applying an auto spacing software.

Written in Python code by Schneider, they go by the name LS Cadencer and the related LS Cadenculator. Before jumping into the heavy technical sides of their talk, Blokland begins with challenges of perception by telling the story of a failed attempt to reconstruct the skeleton of an Elasmosaurus dinosaur and concludes it with a quote by David Kindersley: “It is a common place that we see only what we know.” When Blokland shows examples of early Textura and Renaissance foundry types, he emphasizes their position on rectangles (metal sorts) as a quintessential difference.

Since the founding the Dutch Type Library in 1990 he has been working on the development of professional font tools such as DTL FontMaster, alongside the Hamburg-based company URW++. DTL LetterModeler ist another application used to “built type”. Blokland speaks quickly and explains common type design problematics in anecdotes:

After Blokland’s historical contextualisation, Lukas Schneider begins to demonstrate the digital font tools, an interpretation of his teacher’s research. Schneider acts quickly, opens windows, explains the functions, switches from one drop-down window to the next and closes windows again.

For the less-experienced audience it is a bit difficult to follow – Blokland interrupts: “It is much easier than it looks” – but the results are flawless if not to say convincing. Certainly we’ll be hearing from the duo Blokland and Schneider at future conferences!