Martin Majoor

Martin Majoor (1960) 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 award-winning typefaces Scala and Scala Sans especially for use in its own printed matter. Two years later FSI FontShop International published FF Scala® as the first serious text face in the FontFont Library. In 1993 FF Scala was augmented with a sans-serif version, FF Scala Sans. The sans and the serif versions complement each other admirably. They follow the same principle of form but are two distinct designs. Both FF Scala and FF Scala Sans continue to be very succesful throughout the world.

In 1994 Majoor designed the Dutch telephone directory, for which he did both the typography and, more importantly, created the new typeface Telefont®. Perhaps as a reaction to the very formal work on the phone books, in 1997 Majoor designed FF Scala Jewels; a quartet of classic decorative typefaces based on the capitals of FF Scala Bold.

Majoor’s third major typefamily, FF Seria® was released in 2000. It consists of a serif version and a sanserif versions. In 2001 it was awarded a "Certificate of Excellence" from the ISTD International TypoGraphic Awards 2001 in London and a "Certificate of Excellence in Type Design" from the ATypI Type Design Competition "Bukva:raz!" in Moscow. In 2006/2007 Majoor worked together with Pascal Zoghbi, who designed Sada, the Arabic counterpart for Seria.

The FF Nexus® family (2004) has three versions (a serif, a sanserif and a slabserif), that are all 'connected'. There is also a typewriter versions and two sets of elegantly drawn swash capitals. It was one of FontShops first OpenType® fonts and two years later it won the first prize at the Creative Review Type Design Awards 2006, in the catagory Text Families.

Majoor taught typography at several Schools of Arts and since 1992 he gave lectures at conferences in Budapest, Antwerp, Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona, The Hague, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Stockholm. His work was exhibited in Rotterdam, New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Capetown, Helsinki, Barcelona, Bologna and Ontario. He wrote articles for magazines like Items, 2+3D and Eye. He now works as a graphic designer and type designer in both The Netherlands and Poland.