Indices : Designers : Martin Majoor

Martin Majoor has been designing type since the mid-1980s. After a student placement at URW in Hamburg, he started in 1986 as a typographic designer in the Research & Development department at Océ-Netherlands. There he carried out research into screen typography and worked on the production of digital typefaces for laser printers. In 1988 he started working as a graphic designer for the Vredenburg Music Centre in Utrecht, for whom he designed the typeface Scala for use in their printed matter. Two years later FSI FontShop International published FF Scala™ as the first serious text face in the then-new FontFont-Library. In 1993 FF Scala was augmented with a sans-serif version, FF Scala Sans, which was also released by FSI. In the eyes of the designer the sans and the serif versions complement each other admirably. They follow the same principle of form but are two distinct designs. The second largest newspaper in Holland (Algemeen Dagblad) uses both FF Scala and FF Scala Sans for text and headlines and is a good example of how the two families can work together. In 1994 Majoor started working on the design of the Dutch telephone directory, for which he did both the typography and, more importantly, created a new typeface. The face is called Telefont and comes in two weights: Telefont List and Telefont Text. The Dutch phone company PTT Telekom holds exclusive rights to both fonts. Perhaps as a reaction to the very formal work on the phone books, Majoor designed FF Scala Jewels in 1997, a quartet of classic decorative typefaces based on the capitals of FF Scala Bold.

Typefaces
FF Scala
FF Nexus

External Links

http://www.typotheque.com/articles/my_type_design_philosophy.html