Just van Rossum (born 1966 in Haarlem) is a Dutch typeface designer, software developer, and professor at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague.
As a result, Rossum developed an understanding of computer science principles in his teenage years, an advantage that would influence his identity and philosophy as a designer.
[4] In 1984, Just van Rossum enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, where he studied under Gerrit Noordzij, an influential Dutch typeface designer and author.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague in 1988, Just van Rossum joined the Berlin design firm, MetaDesign, as an intern while the company was still in its infancy.
Impressed by the quality of his revisions, Spiekermann hired Just as a fulltime employee and credited him as a co-designer of the typeface, which was later published as ITC Officina Serif (EF) in 1990.
[7] While working together in Berlin, the two interns began theorizing about potential innovations in typeface design, culminating in their joint publishing of an indie magazine in that same year titled: LettError.
The magazine primarily consists of editorials denouncing the overreliance on Bézier curves and the lack of innovation by typeface designers using Postscript.
The magazine proposed the idea of a "Random Font" which would produce glyphs with unexpected variations upon every print, as opposed to the uniformity provided by a typical typeface.
The team wrote a new function, "freakto", which was similar to "lineto", with the key difference that the destination point would be randomly generated somewhere near the intended location.
[5] In 2011, FF Beowolf was one of 23 typefaces acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of their Standard Deviations Exhibition, displaying important digital fonts.
The software used internet data regarding the Twin Cities such as current reported air temperature to determine the shape and style of the final glyphs.
DrawBot consisted of a text editor that allowed the user to programmatically define shapes using simplified Python functions and a canvas that would display the compiled result of the code.