Petr van Blokland designed his striking Roman typeface in the mid-1980s for the Danish typesetting company Purup. Proforma (which can be loosely translated to mean “for forms”) was groundbreaking at the time for the way that it combined economy of space with good readability.


Proforma was one of the first typefaces to be optimised for electronic setting. Van Blokland succeeded, through clever construction of the characters, in minimising the jagged effect visible at font sizes of 9 to 12 points – despite a resolution of 2540 lines per inch.

The designer was rewarded for this with the ATypI’s Charles Peignot Prize, and in 1995 Proforma was nominated – as the first typeface ever – for the Rotterdam Design Award. Van Blokland released Proforma’s sans-serif companion Productus in 2000.