Jelle Bosma

Born in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, in 1959, Bosma studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He was a product of “Gerrit Noordzij’s school of letters,” which nurtured budding Dutch designers for more than 30 years. Bosma’s contemporaries included Petr van Blokland, Lucas de Groot, Albert-Jan Pool, and Just van Rossum – all prominent names in the type community.

Bosma saw success early in his typographic career. He was the first student in The Hague to sell a typeface design, and his WTC Cursivium™ typeface family was released by the World Typeface Center in 1986. He freelanced after graduation and worked as a type designer for Scangraphic in Hamburg, Germany, where he released the Forlane™ design in 1991.

Bosma joined Monotype in 1992. His role was to oversee TrueType® production and the “hinting” – character fine-tuning that allows character forms, or glyphs, to appear crisp and legible on low-resolution screens. One of Bosma’s first projects for the company’s UK office was to manage the production of Greek and Cyrillic core fonts for the Windows® 3.1 operating system. Known for his work with non-Latin typefaces, Bosma has produced fonts for Hebrew, Thai, Arabic and Indic scripts.

Bosma was part of the team that developed corporate identity typefaces for Nokia. Launched in 2002, the Nokia types include sans, serif, and bitmap versions in varying weights. The Nokia fonts are used for everything from architectural signage and printed brochures to screen type for phones and other devices.

In 2004, Bosma designed the Cambria® serif type family for the Microsoft ClearType® font collection. The Cambria design was included as part of the font set bundled with the Windows Vista™ platform and 2007 Microsoft Office application suite.

Working from his studio near The Hague, Bosma divides his time between designing type, programming font tools, hinting, and other type production projects. He has presented at the International Unicode® Conference, the Association Typographique Internationale (aTypI) conference and other international events.