Book Design
Besides working as a type designer Martin Majoor has always worked as a book typographer and graphic designer. ‘It is my conviction that you cannot be a good type designer if you are not a book typographer.’
He designed several books for Dutch publishers such as Bunge, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, L.J. Veen, Vrij Geestesleven and Elsevier. Three times his book designs were chosen among the Best Dutch Book Designs, especially for its inside book typography, rather than for its covers.
Among these best books was ‘Adieu Aesthetics & Beautiful Pages!’ (Adieu æsthetica & mooie pagina’s!’), published in 1995 as the catalogue for the exhibition ‘The Aesthetic World of Jan van Krimpen, Book Designer and Typographer’ in the Museum of the Book/Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague and in the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in New York (1995). For this book Majoor was the first to use the digital version of Jan van Krimpen’s typeface Romanée (originally cut in 1928 for the Joh. Enschedé typefoundry), which in 1991 had been digitized by Peter Mattias Noordzij and Fred Smeijers for incorporation into the Enschedé Font Foundry (TEFF).
In 2010, together with the french teacher Sebastien Morlighem, he wrote a book on the works of the french type designer José Mendoza y Almeida.
From 1999 until 2010 Majoor was the graphic designer for the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the largest international Polish festival of contemporary music. The programme books were set in Majoor’s own typeface Seria.
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Famous quotes containing the words book and/or design:
“A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)