“Cadencing” in Type Design: Notes After Reading Frank E. Blokland
Every now and then, I stumble across an idea that makes me look at type a little differently. Recently, it was a post by Frank E. Blokland — a type designer, researcher, and teacher whose work often blends deep history with practical methods. His thoughts on spacing and rhythm in type design really stuck with me, so I’m putting them down here as a kind of personal note.
Why “eyeballing” isn’t enough
Most of us, when we start learning type, are told to “trust our eyes.” We adjust spacing until it feels right. But Blokland reminds us that this process is more subjective than we think. What looks “right” is often just what we’ve been trained to see, shaped by history, habits, or even technical limitations.
That’s not necessarily wrong — but it’s also not the whole picture.
From intuition to rhythm
With digital tools, we no longer have to rely only on eyeballing. Blokland introduces the idea of cadencing: finding the rhythm behind a typeface, especially the measured distances between vertical strokes (the stem intervals).
Once you see this rhythm, spacing stops being a matter of endless optical tweaking. Instead, it becomes a system you can reproduce, adjust, and carry across weights — all while keeping consistency intact.
A glimpse in practice
Blokland shared an example using DTL Unico Regular by Michael Harvey. The spacing was generated with LS Cadencer, a plugin for Glyphs created by Lukas Schneider, one of Blokland’s former students.
The entire font was spaced in seconds. Change a parameter, and the system updates instantly. It’s not just about speed — it’s about uncovering the structure that was always there, just hidden behind “designer’s intuition.”
The bigger lesson
None of this means we should abandon our eyes. Visual judgment will always be part of type design. But as Blokland puts it: “the eyes only transfer information: one cannot see more than one knows.”
And that’s the point. The more we understand the structures that shape type, the sharper our eyes become. Cadencing isn’t just a technical trick — it’s a way of seeing, one that makes the invisible rhythm of type visible.