Markeur (1972*)
My first professional type design was Markeur, for Joh. Enschedé & Zonen, Haarlem. By 1970 Enschedé’s last punchcutter, Henk Drost, had few opportunities to practise his original craft, so the typefoundry had looked for a new sort of work: signage, with letters cut into laminated plastic sheets. For this purpose Sem Hartz had designed Panture (1971), a series of seriffed capitals. Markeur was designed as a sans serif alternative. Usually engraved lettering of this kind is the same thickness all over, like din letters. Drost pointed out that if he wanted to produce perfect letters he had to go through the groove twice anyway. If these two tracks were made not to overlap each other exactly, but were slightly offset, it was possible to create letters with different thicknesses. The rounded corners are the result of using rotating bits.

* For dating type designs it is possible to use the year of publication, but sometimes variants, e.g. bold or small capitals, are published after the normal versions. The initial sketches, of course, are produced a lot earlier. The dates on this website are publication dates. But occasionally publication proceeds in phases, designs are sometimes launched at conferences when only half finished, and sometimes they are shown to customers or published in the trade press as soon as the first variants are finished.