2020 Gerard Unger Scholarship Results

Rezak

Rezak is a type family inspired by cutting letters out of a solid material. With only a few cuts, the shapes remain dark and simple. With more cuts, the shapes become lighter and more defined. The range of Rezak’s core weights highlight this relationship between cuts and lightness. Rezak also features an italic for the regular style and an incised style for use in large titles. As the TypeTogether team, we see another benefit: this family is not sequestered within one specific genre or script, so we can imagine how it could be interpreted for other scripts.

José Scaglione and Veronika Burian, the founders of TypeTogether, commented about the 2020 edition of the scholarship: “This year, the scholarship recipient is Russian type designer Anya Danilova with her Rezak family, a Latin and Cyrillic type family. Her work is bold, energetic, and well informed. And while it is in every sense a novel design that will make great company to previous Gerard Unger Scholarship winners, it also displays a wink to the work of some type masters like Preissig, Menhart, or Dwiggins. This push toward creativity and innovation with an eye on typography’s rich history is an important part of our foundry’s efforts.”

As the sixth recipient, Anya Danilova has joined a unique club of previous scholarship recipients: Roxane Gataud (Bely), Juan Bruce (Noort), Quentin Schmerber (Temeraire), Bogidar Mascareñas (Laima), and Florian Fecher’s upcoming Lektorat family (previously Redaktion). Each of the Gerard Unger Scholarship published typefaces have won awards, including the coveted TDC Certificate of Excellence award for three of them.

Participants

This year we received almost 100 submissions from all over the world — from fourty-five schools and showcasing eighteen different scripts. The TypeTogether team has selected the main scholarship winner and awarded merits to eight other outstanding typeface projects: Bacon by Adriana De La Torre Cervantes, Exposure by Federico Parra Barrios, Figurat by Abel Martins, Leonore by Helene Krieger, Quinta by Carina M. Huynh, Rapida by Michelangelo Nigra, Diafone by Renan Rosatti, and Tiga by Sirin Gunkloy.

The annual Gerard Unger Scholarship helps promising typeface design students develop their careers. TypeTogether’s aim is to enable exceptional projects started during a course of study to be finalised and published commercially as soon as possible after the end of the course.

The original idea of starting a scholarship six years ago came about after Veronika Burian and José Scaglione visited the MATD students at the University of Reading. They saw projects that were truly creative, or that were at least quite promising, but students often had to look for a job immediately after finishing their post-graduate course. As a result, many of those worthwhile projects were sadly left aside and never published. So they originally created the mentorship program to help a selected student bring their project to a publishable state.

The core of the program is in the mentorship provided to the selected student, giving them a look behind the scenes of a successful foundry and offering collective experience and expertise. José Scaglione explains: “We look for fresh and inspiring ideas, a creative drive, and a sense of experimentation that is mostly found in students who still have a virgin eye for type design without having to consider commercial viability. At the same time, we look carefully at the concept of the submitted typefaces and how well it might fit into our overall retail library so as to avoid internal competition. The type family’s level of completion and its potential, as well as the quality of shapes and attention to detail, are also essential to our final decision.”

Merits

We want to thank every student who submitted their typefaces to the Gerard Unger Scholarship, and also the teachers and tutors who have helped throughout the process. The incredible response from students and their impressive work makes this worthwhile.

José and Veronika have given each merit winner an exclusive feedback session, a merit certificate, and a social media badge. Join us in congratulating them on their achievements!

We also want to thank all the other participants for their submissions. While they may not been selected for the Gerard Unger Scholarship, we wish them the very best on their future path in type design!