Jan van Krimpen

Jan van Krimpen (12 February 1892 in Gouda 20 October 1958 in Haarlem) was a Dutch typographer and type designer. He worked for the printing house Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé.

Type designs

Haarlemmer, a text typeface designed by Van Krimpen in 1938.
Spectrum, a text typeface designed by Van Krimpen between 1941 and 1943.

Van Krimpen's type designs are elegant book typefaces, originally made for manual printing and the monotype machine. Although a good few have been digitised (Romulus, Haarlemmer, Spectrum), the typefaces are only rarely used in publications.

Of special note is the Romulus 'superfamily', consisting of a seriffed font, a cursive, a chancery italic (Cancelleresca Bastarda), a sans-serif, and a Greek in a range of weights. Such an extensive family would have been a first, comparable to today's Scala family. The outbreak of the Second World War disrupted the project before completion. After the war, Van Krimpen was not interested in resuming it.

Foundry Type

These foundry types were designed by Jan van Krimpen:[1]

References

  1. Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopedia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983, ISBN 0-7137-1347-X, p. 2408-249
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