Speaker Introduction – Roel Nieskens
We all know it: there are tools you use for years before you ever ask who made them. For a lot of us Wakamai Fondue is one of those, well, at least for me it is. You drop a font file into the Wakamai Fondue and it tells you, in plain words, what that font can do. (Psst: say the name of the tool out loud with a slightly silly accent and you get the joke.) The person behind it is Roel Nieskens and I am delighted that he is joining us for beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027.
If his face feels familiar, you might have seen him on Kevin Powell’s YouTube channel, giving a CSS Typography Crash Course while trying to talk over his own very loud keyboard. And since Kevin is already on board for 2027, I simply love the idea of the two of them sharing the same stage in April. Full circle, you know?
Who is Roel
Roel is an independent developer from the Netherlands. He calls himself a creative software developer, GitHub knows him as a “computernerd from hell” and he has been writing software since the Y2K problem. He loves the web, fonts, webfonts and, as he puts it, all combinations thereof. Most of his work happens under the name PixelAmbacht.
His client list reads like a small who’s who of type. For Font Awesome he helped engineer their icon fonts and modernise the CSS used on tens of millions of websites. For Google Fonts he built showcase sites and did prototyping and font engineering for the Noto Emoji font. He worked on the front end for Typotheque, The Type Founders and NaN’s fonts.xyz, and on several projects for LettError, who you might remember from our stage back in 2013.
Serious Fun With Fonts
What I like a lot about Roel is the mischief. I mean, scroll through his blog and you find a Commodore 64 demo built in pure CSS, a font that breaks browsers, Mr. Poo (the world’s first animated colour emoji font, and yes, it is 💩) and Sans Bullshit Sans, a font that uses ligatures to replace buzzwords with a censorship bar. I love it and shared that one on my own blog back then.
But underneath the jokes there is real depth. In 2016 he took Font Awesome’s font files apart, trimmed the fat and did the maths: with the font running on around 73 million websites, those few saved kilobytes added up to almost 2000 terabytes a day. A little later he was working on those very fonts himself. He writes about things like the variable font inheritance problem and the hidden superpower of optical sizes and at CSS Day 2024 he gave a wonderful and great talk called “Problems Solved by OpenType”.
And when he is not building websites or fonts? He writes 6502 machine language for the C64, rides and repairs old motorcycles, listens to loud music (🤘) and, in his own words, is a funny dad.
Why Roel Fits beyond tellerrand
Type has been part of beyond tellerrand since the very first edition. And still, for many of us maybe, a font is something we pick, load and then forget about. Roel is the person who reminds you that fonts have settings too, that there is a whole world of features hiding inside those files and that exploring them can be ridiculously good fun. Nerdy, generous with his knowledge and never taking himself too seriously. That is exactly the mix I love to have on stage.
Oh, and in case you wonder how to pronounce his name: his about page has a cartoon of two robots next to a sign that says “Rule: Knee Scans”. Say it fast. ;)
Welcome on board, Roel!
beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.