The Faces Behind Typefaces

Gerard Unger, a Dutch graphic and type designer, inspired thousands of typographers to dive deep into research and dare to experiment. The designer of Brazilian descent, Luisa Baeta, was lucky to meet him in person and soak up the knowledge firsthand.

Luisa started out as a graphic designer but eventually joined the University of Reading to study type design. Here she met Gerhard Unger, a thoughtful mentor, who was lecturing in her course. The master navigated her in search of her own style, encouraged the wildest ideas and even suggested a name for her typeface.

Since then, Luisa fell in love with typography and spent a few years working as a type designer in an agency. Later a winding path led the young designer to New York, where she got back to graphic design, now with a feeling of a good type. Currently, Luisa is a member of the Type Directors Club and an active part of the female-run and female-oriented platform ‘Alphabettes’, helping women in design to raise their voices. In the article, Luisa commemorates Gegard Unger and reveals the unknown sides of the famous type designer.

Observing the world

I met Gerard Unger, the incredible type designer and our guest teacher, when I started my master’s degree classes at Reading University. He was a special person, able to put together a thoughtful and systematic approach to theory and a free approach to observation. Type design is a discipline that very often runs the risk of being very narrow and focused, as it makes you go deeper and deeper into details—and get stuck between zooming out to see the paragraph and then jumping back to the smallest serif.

Unger was constantly bringing things from outside the realm of design. One day he was observing birds. He noted the way their wings curved as they flew and admired the elegance of this curve, the speed in it, and all at once started to think how he could draw a typeface that repeats this nature-driven form. He found the shape and created a new masterpiece, the typeface named ‘Swift’ after the bird that inspired him. Gerard Unger was able to take something out of the visual world and translate it into a legible, unique, and impactful design.

The art of experimentation

I've heard Unger complaining about being distracted by letterforms. He said it was the curse of being a type designer: you start noticing typefaces and it slows down your reading. But it doesn't mean a designer should be neutral in typefaces. There is not much space for you to deviate from the shape of letters before they stop being legible, but still enough for an artistic maneuver. That's why we haven't been just looking at the same shapes for the past hundreds of years.

Type design is always about answering an aesthetic brief in a different way while working with the same essential skeletons. The result can be very legible and functional while being highly innovative. This is something that Gerard Unger has definitely accomplished.

He had a very free and very encouraging approach to experimentation. He once shared that he knows exactly how far he can go with experimentation and when he is crossing the line where readers will become aware of his experimentation. And knowing all that, the master was going one step over that line on purpose. But of course, he never let art or experimentation speak louder than the text. I’ve adopted this approach and it helped me more than once in my own projects.