Jan Van Krimpen - Type Designs

Type Designs

Van Krimpen's type designs are elegant book typefaces, originally made for manual printing and the monotype machine.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.