By his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, the Font­Font library is a young library. Most of the design­ers behind it were still at school when dig­i­tal type started to free type design and pro­duc­tion from its indus­trial con­straints and the divi­sion of labour. Among those young design­ers, Evert Bloemsma was one of the oldest and most experienced.

He dig­i­tized his first type­face at URW in 1987, still on a big main­frame com­puter. The Font­Font library released all his idio­syn­cratic faces: FF Bal­ance (1993), FF Cocon (1998/2001), FF Avance (2000), FF Legato (2004). All of Evert’s work was con­cerned with find­ing new answers to the old chal­lenges of read­ing under var­i­ous cir­cum­stances, in dif­fer­ent media. FF Legato has already been praised not only as his most mature design to date, but also as a rad­i­cal new way of design­ing the white space, paying as much atten­tion to counter shapes as to the black marks on the page.

In his prime and at the height of his pro­fes­sion, Evert died sud­denly at his home in Arnhem, Nether­lands. His friends and col­leagues at FSI will miss him as a friend and as a con­trib­u­tor. We all owe Evert a lot.

Jan Mid­den­dorp knew Evert well. He wrote this ear­lier today:

“Of all the type design­ers I have known and have writ­ten about, Evert had the most com­plex per­son­al­ity, and pos­si­bly the most orig­i­nal mind and the weird­est sense of humour. He kept promis­ing me, with his char­ac­ter­is­tic mix­ture of boyish enthu­si­asm, solemn ded­i­ca­tion and self-​mockery, that he would one day cover the entire distan’e between his home in Arnhem and mine in Ghent on his reclin­ing bike. I was sure he’d make it, sooner or later — he always car­ried out his plans, although some took him ten years to com­plete. It fills me with grief, wonder and anger that Evert, who was always advo­cat­ing exer­cise and healthy food, has now been taken away from us because of a heart failure.

As a type designer, Evert was unortho­dox, a true orig­i­nal. Each of his four type fam­i­lies was the out­come of a highly per­sonal inves­ti­ga­tion, a chal­lenge to him­self. To others, he could be as demand­ing as he was to him­self; when crit­i­ciz­ing his friends’ typo­graphic work, he was bru­tally honest and always to the point. Yet he remained amaz­ingly modest, even inse­cure, about his own work, and deeply grate­ful to those who would com­ment on the early ver­sions of his type­faces and/or test them in print. In spite of the single-​mindedness with which he worked on his type designs during those months of total con­cen­tra­tion, he was open to many other intel­lec­tual stim­uli. He had worked as a pho­tog­ra­pher of archi­tec­ture (con­struct­ing his own hand-​operated panoramic camera), inter­viewed the design­ers he admired (such as Wim Crouwel and Hans Reichel) about their design phi­los­o­phy, and lately became fas­ci­nated by the work of Mar­shall McLuhan. His lec­tures and arti­cles, too, were evi­dence of his orig­i­nal ideas on form and on reading.

It is a great loss indeed.”

 — Erik, Joan, & Petra for FontShop International

The type com­mu­nity bids farewell to Evert »