LettError Biography
Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum studied at
the Royal Academy for Fine & Applied Arts in The
Hague. Encouraged by their teacher Gerrit
Noordzij they studied the design of typefaces,
which happened to coincide conveniently with the
invention of desktop publishing and fonts.
Their cooperation, branded LettError,
started in Berlin in the form of the randomising
typeface Beowolf. Now more than 10 years later
they still work separately together on various
projects. That means that there is no LettError
office, but still typefaces (Instant Types,
Trixie, Advert, Kosmik, Federal), typography,
graphic design, sites and movies get produced.
LettError clients include the Dutch PTT, for which they've made two series of stamps, MTV Europe, KPN (the Dutch telecom), GAK (a branch of privatised government), the province of South Holland (a branch of non privatised government), Apple Computer and many others.
LettError's professional philosophy says something about programming, tools, design and type. The programming part is important - they've developed special applications to assist in design work, such as a calendar machine for KPN, a visual noise machine for MTV, a layout-gridfitter for the 1999 Dutch Christmas stamps, and map-making machines for MTV and TPG (Dutch PTT and TNT couriers).
Together with Erik's oldest brother Petr van Blokland, they have developed RoboFog, a tool for programming typedesigners. Programming language of choice is python, which is in turn developed by Just's older brother Guido van Rossum. RoboFog has been essential in typedesign projects as the RobotFonts (1998) and LTR Federal (1995-1999). Other LettError developments are GifWrap, a system to include type in a website without giving away fonts, BitPull, a way to make bitmapped type incredibly flexible, RandomFonts and FlippperFonts - ways to produce dynamic fonts. Current projects include Robofab, a Python library for programming with font and glyph data. Van Rossum and Van Blokland have designed and engineered custom typefaces for organisations and companies in Europe and America. for instance the Twin Cities typeface for the Design Institute of the University of Minnesota. Their work has been featured in the Droog Design exhibition. LettError fonts are sold through FontShop and FontFont as well as the online LettError shop.
Education
Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland both teach at the Type & Media department of the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.