Jelle Bosma’s technical expertise and creative vision allow him to play many roles on the typographic stage.

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.