Right fig­ures in the his­tory of design of­ten over­shad­ow their equally tal­en­ted, but less for­tu­nate con­tem­por­ar­ies. The bright stars of 1960s–80s Dutch design, such as Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn, ec­lipsed a whole galaxy of prom­in­ent de­sign­ers. The names and work of some of them only came to be known out­side the Neth­er­lands at the be­gin­ning of this cen­tury, in part through the ef­forts of re­search­ers and the grow­ing wave of in­terest in Dutch mod­ern­ism. Nev­er­the­less, the world con­tin­ues to dis­cov­er these for­got­ten names, to the de­light and sur­prise of a new gen­er­a­tion of de­sign­ers.

In March 2013, Unit Edi­tions pub­lished a small book that shed light on the life and work of Dutch­man Jur­ri­aan Schro­fer (1926–1990), a ver­sat­ile de­sign­er little known out­side his own coun­try. His designs for pho­to­books and cor­por­ate iden­tit­ies were in­nov­at­ive, and he helped to or­gan­ize the design com­mu­nity and elab­or­ate state policy re­gard­ing the cre­at­ive in­dus­tries. At the peak of his ca­reer in the 70s, his bizarre ex­per­i­ment­al ap­proach to the con­struc­tion of typefaces and com­plex rhythmic com­pos­i­tions based on them set him apart. In Novem­ber of the same year, an ex­tens­ive mono­graph on Schro­fer was pub­lished, and a year later fol­lowed a book of his sketches and drafts. These three pub­lic­a­tions were the basis for this book re­view.

PTo make this piece more com­plete, we found two more books pub­lished dur­ing Schro­fer’s life­time, to which he con­trib­uted per­son­ally—Jur­ri­aan Schro­fer (1972) and Zi­en­derogen (1988). In ad­di­tion, Jur­ri­aan Schro­fer’s bio­graph­er and re­search­er of the his­tory of Dutch design, Fre­de­rike Huy­gen, kindly agreed to an­swer ques­tions about Schro­fer’s per­son­al­ity and his work on the afore­men­tioned books. We would like to start our re­view with this in­ter­view.