Fred Smeijers was born in 1961 in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. He studied at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem before starting his design career in 1986, creating typefaces for laser printers. In 1987 he began working as a teacher of lettering and typeface design before helping to found the Arnhem design practice Quadraat in the early 1990s, which lent its name to his debut typeface, published in 1992. Quadraat was followed by fonts such as Renard, Fresco and Sansa amongst other fonts, some of which were published by the OurType label that Smeijers founded in 2003. Smeijers spent a number of years designing the Arnhem font for the official daily newspaper of the Dutch government. That typeface was first published in 2002.

Smeijers’ career has also included a host of academic lectures and the release of book publications (Counterpunch, 1996; Type Now, 2003). In 2004 he was made Professor of Digital Typography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig.