Gerard Unger

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Gerard Unger (Arnhem, 22 January 1942) is a graphic developers of type fonts. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and subsequently worked at Total Design, Prad and Joh. Enschedé. In 1975, he established himself as an independent developer. He lives and works in in Bussum.

Apart from a large number of font types, of which several specially developed for newspapers (font types with a large x-height and large inner designs such as Swift, Gulliver, Coranto en Vesta), he also develops designs for magazines, coins, books, logos and stamps.

Unger taught part-time at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication. He has been the first lecturer since 1 September 2006 at the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Leiden. Dr. P.A. Tiele Stichting ensured that creation of this position at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Leiden.

His most important publication is Terwijl je leest (1997) (rough translation: While you read). This later appeared in different languages and in 2006 was completely revised and reprinted. In 2004, he changed reading by speaking on Tiele-reading under the title “Veranderend lezen” (rough translation: Transformed Reading).

Unger has received various accolades, including the H.N. Werkman prize (1984) and the Maurits Enschedé prize (1991).

A large number of letter types of Unger are now available from Linotype and the Dutch Type Library. He has released new work under his own ownership since 1995. Among his most popular fonts are: Demos (1976/2001), Flora (1984), Swift (1985/1995), Amerigo (1986), Argo (1991), Gulliver (1993), ANWB-fonts (1997), Capitolium (1998), Paradox (1999), Coranto (2000) en Vesta (2001). In 2005, he developed a type font for the German insurer Allianz AG as part of their in-house style. Capitolium News (2006) has been the type font of the Volkskrant since 2 December 2006.

Unger has designed typefaces for the signage systems of both the Dutch highways and the Amsterdam metro.

His newspaper face Gulliver (1993) is familiar to millions of readers, as it's the typeface used in both USA Today and several other European newspapers, including the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Whilst his typeface Coranto is the typeface for The Scotsman and Brazilian newspaper Valor.