Lucas de Groot, an Influential Person in Type Design

Born on June 21st, 1963 Lucas de Groot was born in Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands. He is known as being an influential Dutch type designer and has worked with and for, many well-known companies and publications. Between 1982 and 1987 he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague under Gerrit Noordzij. Between 1989 and 1993 he worked on corporate identity projects at the Dutch design group BRS Premsela Vonk. In 1993 he joined MetaDesign in Berlin where he worked with Erik Spiekermann on the development of the FF Meta family.

He is most famously known for designing custom fonts for prestigious newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo, Le Monde, Metro and Der Spiegel. Aside from designing for major publications, he is also well known for creating corporate type for international companies including Sun Microsystems, Bell South, Heineken, Siemens and Miele.

One of his major achievements, which he created during the rise of Microsoft, was the creation of two font families. The first family was known as the ‘monospaced’ font family Consolas, the new alternative to Courier.

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The second font family was known as Calibri, the new default typeface in MS Word.

He is mostly known for the very large font family Thesis (TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix, TheSansMono and later TheAntiqua) and Corpid (previously AgroSans). De Groot has also designed various custom fonts for particular clients: SunSans for Sun Microsystems; SpiegelSans and Taz for, respectively, the German magazines Der Spiegel and die tageszeitung; and FolhaSerif for the Brazilian newspaper Folha.

De Groot later on founded his own type foundry, LucasFonts, in 2000 due to his successes with creating so many successful font families.

Its aim, in a few words: to make the world a better place by designing typefaces that look good and work well under any circumstances and in many languages. Graphic designers across the planet have discovered the special qualities of Luc(as)’ fonts. They are attracted by their functionality and friendly appearance and love the enormous range of possibilities that each family offers. Many also appreciate the idiosyncrasies – a quest for extremes that has resulted in some of the narrowest, thinnest, wittiest or boldest typefaces around. He is currently the head of the type foundry Fontfabrik.