Gerard Unger

Recent articles about Gerard Unger

Ambassador for reading

Issue 102, Autumn 2021

Review

In his daughter Flora’s schoolyard, the late Dutch type designer Gerard Unger (1942-2018) was once approached by a mother who told him that her daughter … [EXTRACT]

Rules of engagement

Issue 98, Spring 2019

Review

Back in 2005, I wrote ‘In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory’, a somewhat…

Endangered species

Issue 53, Autumn 2004

Review

Piet Gerards is a craftsman. You can’t fail to notice this from the moment you…

Sense of place

Issue 58, Winter 2005

Feature

Three new typefaces for local institutions draw on Sheffield’s cultural and typographic history

Electrifying the alphabet

Issue 62, Winter 2006

Feature

At the dawn of the computer age, new functions ushered in new forms for type design

Why Helvetica?

Issue 40, Summer 2001

Feature

Despite the changes provoked by the digital ‘revolution’, designing a typeface for serious reading remains a time-consuming task. For the designer, choosing and setting a body text font can be equally daunting, resulting in some inspired, eccentric and provocative choices

Reputations: Gerard Unger

Issue 40, Summer 2001

Feature

‘Papers have all kinds of information on the same page; very distressing and very joyful; gossip and facts. I wanted to bring that variety, that liveliness into the typeface design.’

Technology, aesthetics and type

Issue 3, Spring 1991

Feature

With a substantial body of work already completed, Gerard Unger’s designs are entering a new phase.

The digital wave

Issue 7, Summer 1992

Feature

The old manufacturing companies that dominated typeface production through most of this century have been swallowed and largely pushed to the sidelines, while initiatives in design – and in the terms and routines that condition design – have been made by a few rapidly growing software and computer hardware companies. Pathbreaking contributions have come from small studios or individual designers working, in every sense, from just a desktop. There have been ‘font wars’, corporate piracy and copyright contravention on a large scale. To use the loose terminology by which we attempt to carve up typographic history, it is clear that during the 1980s, the developed world left behind photographic typography (to which metal had ceded) and entered the era of the ‘digital’

Recent blog posts about Gerard Unger

Noted #77

7 September 2016
Book design, Brand madness, Magazines, Music design, Technology, Typography

Beer cans, Dutch Alphabets, the Global Synthesizer Project, An Anthology of Decorated Papers and Chanced Arm no. 2
Here are a few things – beer cans, books, a sound installation and a magazine…