JS-SANS ROUNDED ― Geometric Sans-Serif
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Another font addition to the ever evolving and growing collection of revivals and inspired works called LETTERS OP MAAT, a project celebrating and trying to recreate the typographic contributions originally designed by Dutch graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer. This time I did a revision based on a alphabet system Schrofer originally created somewhere during the late 1960s.

Its a simple, yet solid and clean looking geometric sans-serif style with medium contrast on its vertical axis. The alphabet as it originally was created by Schrofer featured a Lowercase (A-Z) character set with Small Caps figures (numerals) only, no symbols or punctuation marks were included.

This particular lettering was used in many of his work, such as book designs, brochure and post-stamps, so there is no shortage of resource material on the internet for this alphabet system. Over the course of its existence it was constantly evolving, and Schrofer kept expanding the alphabet system with additional new weights and slight variations. But during his time with Mouton & Co. the concept basics for this sans system became one of his workhorse letterings, and saw widespread application, with appearances dating back as early as 1968, when Schrofer developed the designs for the 1969 Dutch post-stamp.

I've already done a revival for this alphabet back in 2018. This was during my first year of joining FontStruct, so therefore the first revival attempt now seems more like an insult to Schrofer's brilliance rahter than a tribute.

Pointing out some of the flaws present in the old recap:

Certain key design characteristics weren't extrapolated properly throughout all of the required letters or were missing completely (imo. this is one aspect of a font revival the designer at least has to do right). Its Uppercase forms looked as if they did actually belong to another font all together, back then no additional Lining figures were included that would suit the newly added Uppercase letters, and only a handful of very poorly crafted symbols and punctuation marks was included. As a matter of fact, it was only just the second Schrofer work I ever digitalized. So yeah...

— Now five years later the time had arrived for the rematch.

And this time I wasn't going to enter the tekken as the new farmhand or a lazy dog. But came well prepared to battle that grumpy wizard as a quick brown fox. Five boxing muscles flexed and sufficient toxic brews at hand, but above all.. A postgraduate academic with a Master's degree in "DIY FontStructivism" at the university of Home. So there weren't many very exquisite codfish eggs to judge my fizzy vow. Jack proved strong, but picking only six quinces, unable to quickly fax Judge Pat, he eventually been left a puzzled women, and so I jumped jewels when I was crowned the Sphinx's evil Queen Fredericka.

— I think that is summarizing it all very neatly.

But, just in (lower), case, here is a "Give me Gum-Gum-" explanation for all you rocket scientists among us:

For this revision I only used Schrofer's original red / white alphabet sample composition. Sticking with just one resource made sure I kept a non-biased vision for extrapolating the remainder of the character set. This simply because shear amount of variations that Schrofer had contributed to this alphabet system would make it difficult to consistently combine everything into one complete work.

I reproduced and included all Schrofer's lowercase characters and numerals as were shown in his original composition. From that point out I designed the rest of the font myself as faithful I possibly could. Yet in the end two major change were made to my recap in relation to Schrofer's original that aren't typically very desirable in a revival and therefore not recommend when strictly aiming at reviving a original work, but in the case of this Schrofer alphabet in terms of how it was provided by himself it was rather wisdom than that it was madness.

Let me explain what changes were made and what effect they have in terms of to what extend it deviates away from technically speaking still classifying as a revival. First of all, his original Lowercase letter f is very interruptive in a line of text. Up to a point that is really taking a toll on its overall aesthetics. So I modified the original ever so slighty, basically all I did was decreasing the length of the horizontal crossbar a tad bit so that it would allow additional kerning for the character to eliminate the issue it innitially created. I relocated Schrofers original form into the Full Width Unicode block as alternative form.

The other major change was essentially the complete redesign of numerals forms. I replaced Schrofer's original Small Caps figures with a new set of newly designed Lining figures to be the font's default figures, making the default text figures a far better match for the newly introduced Uppercase alphabet letters. Schrofers Small Caps forms are still in there, but now relocated to the Full Width Unicode block as glyph alternative forms as well.

Both of which affect the font's innitial physical appearance, but thanks to some rearranging of segments within the character set neither will have effect on the reviving part of the project, since all of Schrofer's original letterforms are still included and available for use. But this was done to bring a certain level of harmony and logic to the piece from a typeface-standard perspective. So technically this would classify SANS ROUNDED as revision and not a revival. Which to the broader sense is correct. But it also still technically could be used to function as a revival. So perhaps it could be both at the same time?

Than in addition to that I also provided a small number of glyph alternative forms that are located in both the Full Width and Private Use Area 1 Unicode blocks.

Extra alternative glyph forms are:
 ⮻  ａｃｅｆｇｊｒｓｔＶｖｙｚ
 ⮻  4× experimental lowercase letter 'g' alternate forms
 ⮻  small latin letter 'Eth'

I hope you like it,

Interrested in more of my Jurriaan Schrofer inspired? Please take a look a my complete collection of Fontstructions tagged with STF-LETTERS OP MAAT for the full catalog of fonts I contributed to this project so far.

Cheers