British columbia obituaries archives
Luc(as) de Groot
Luc(as) de Groot (, The Netherlands) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague under Gerrit Noordzij. He then spent four years with the Dutch agency BRS Premsela designing corporate identities. This was also a time in which he taught at the Art Academy in Den Bosch and carried freelance work out, too.
Lucas de groot biography of alberta brown He then spent four years with the Dutch design group BRS Premsela, mainly on corporate identity work. His approach to type design is the best approach to any design: dissatisfaction with what is available. It makes me very sad to see digital type so far from the original designs. Four years later I had a teaching position and I began receiving great assignments outside the agency.In , he moved to Berlin to join the staff at MetaDesign. As a typographic director there, he worked on a diverse range of corporate design projects, from logos to magazine concepts and custom typefaces, in addition to fine-tuning and implementing type generally.
To try to compensate for all that hard work, Luc(as) began to create several quickly-programmed novelty typefaces.
Back then, he thought that he would immediately die if he was not creative every day.
Lucas de groot biography of alberta At regular intervals he is being asked to lecture. Bujardet N. So I had to make myself independent, and started my own company. Together with the Dutch typographer Wim Westerveld he started a new company.He still believes that, and his experiments help keep him alive, just as illustration and gardening do.
At the beginning of Luc(as) accepted a half-time teaching position in Potsdam, a city just outside of Berlin that had been part of the former East Germany until The Fachhochschule Potsdam was founded shortly after the German reunification and is one of a small handful of schools in Germany to employ a professor of type development.
Luc(as) used this opportunity to leave MetaDesign, setting up FontFabrik with his fellow Dutchman Wim Westerveld, who today is the professor for typography at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Although FontFabrik underwent many changes since , it initially offered services to design and advertising agencies, including typeface and logo development, as well as digital implementation.
The goal of FontFabrik was always to enrich the typographic climate.
Lucas de groot biography of alberta canada Someone had written the page numbers in the school newspaper by hand. At that point I was looking for a new challenge — I thought Amsterdam was too small. Do you have a special insterest for the typographic specificities of these customers? At the same time, his experimental alphabets are never arbitrary or random, but conceptually and formally thrilling.It may be difficult to imagine today, but the typographic climate had major issues back in the s. Many of the digital typefaces available then were nothing more than weak derivations of designs that had been beautiful in hot-metal and photographic typesetting. They were poorly digitized by technicians without feeling for type, with only financial interests in mind.
Luc(as) likes to say that he would rather read a page in a deliberately bad face than one set in a poorly digitized Bembo, Helvetica, Times or even Frutiger. It was sad to see digital type morph so far away from what the original designs like.
Lucas de groot biography of alberta king At both studios he designed several book covers with hand-drawn alphabets that were reproduced photographically. Kobayashi D. I was single, so I went for it. They are poorly digitized by technicians without feeling for type, with only financial interests.The type hype that began to take hold in around the time Luc(as) moved to Berlin has grown ever since. The most recent revolution happened around when more and more websites began to be built with diverse palettes of webfonts. Many of the typefaces Luc(as) published since have also proved successful in that medium. The introduction of webfonts exposed even more professional grounds to the importance type has, and this represents an important part of Luc(as)’s business.
By the time that Luc(as) established the LucasFonts foundry in , he was already well-known as the curve doctor – a man with what Erik Spiekermann used to call “typomania,” or a severe addiction to type. Luc(as) is a manic maker. One keyboard is not enough for him, just like one processor is not enough, one font family is not enough, and one brush is not enough.
He is devoted to type, day and night. Drawing perfect curves and getting text-rendering to be pixel perfect has been the most important things in his life for decades.