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Selfportrait
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| Luc(as) de Groot (1963, The Netherlands) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague under Gerrit Noordzij. He then spent four years with the Dutch design group BRS Premsela, mainly on corporate identity work. In the meantime, he taught at the Art Academy in Den Bosch and freelanced before moving to Berlin in 1993 to join MetaDesign for another four years. There, he occasionally finds time for sleep between work, reading, writing and drawing. At regular intervals he is being asked to lecture. These lectures are inspiring and fun to watch. A mixture of education, selfpromotion and fun, which can take up to 4 hours. |
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Many of the current digital typefaces are nothing more than very weak derivations of faces that were beautiful in hot metal and fotographic typesetting. They are poorly digitized by technicians without feeling for type, with only financial interests. I would rather read a page in a face that is deliberately bad, than text in poorly digitized Bembos Helveticas, Times and even Frutiger. It makes me very sad to see digital type so far from the original designs. Today's type hype will even grow bigger. Now that every office printer can print many different types, people are forced to choose, and become more aware of type. |
Another selfportrait.
(the purple thing in the back) The 4 guys in the front are
FontShop people.
| On the one hand Luc(as) is doing very serious typographic
work. He designs type to serve corporate needs. As typographic director
at MetaDesign in Berlin, he worked on a diversity of Corporate Design projects.
From logos, magazine concepts and custom typefaces, to finetuning and implementing
type, he takes any interesting challenge. Devoted to type, day and night.
The beginning of 1997 Luc(as) accepted a half time teaching position in Potsdam, a former east German city just outside of Berlin. The Fachhochschule Potsdam was grounded shortly after the unification of Germany and is currently the only school in Germany to employ a proffessor of type developement. Together with the Dutch typographer Wim Westerveld he started a new company.
Under the name FontFabrik he offers services like type- and logo-development
and digital implementation to design and advertising agencies. The goal
of the Fabrik is the enrichment of the typographic
climate.
For SUN Microsystems two exclusive typeface family were designed. For the dutch ministry of Landbouw, Natuurbeheer en Visserij FontFabrik developed an exclusive typeface family. |
| I try to compensate this hard work with quickly programmed novelty typefaces. I would die immediately if I could not create daily. Such experiments keep me alive, as do my illustrations and writings. For me, this has appeared to be a very good way to get rid of anything that might bother my mind.(Adults only.) |
Luc(as) de Groot
FontFabrik
Apostel-Paulus-Straße 32
D-10823 Berlin
phone +49 (0)30 78703097
mobile +49 (0)171 2656149
e-mail luc@is.in-berlin.de
