2024 Gerard Unger Scholarship results

Anne-Dauphine Borione

2024 winner: Dargon by Anne-Dauphine Borione 
Congratulations to this year’s scholarship winner, Anne-Dauphine Borione and her Dargon font family! “We particularly relish Dargon’s fantasy theme,” said Veronika, “and its fresh and contemporary take on an uncial style. The family is idiosyncratic and yet functional, combined with a warm and approachable serif.”

The rest of the TypeTogether team had this to say about Dargon: “This project’s purpose is rooted in fantasy, and it fulfills this goal perfectly. With its many weights and additional uncial style, Dargon will apply to video games, film titles, album covers, branding, apps, trading cards, and more all across the board(games).”

Anne-Dauphine Borione, aka Daytona Mess online, is a type designer from Paris, France. She is mostly known for her experimental and display approach to type, influenced by her bachelor in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, London, 2016. In 2024 she graduated from TypeMedia in The Hague, The Netherlands, where she learned how to draw more conventional typefaces and gained traditional typographic skills which are now feeding back into her display practice.

Anne-Dauphine intends to take her Dargon project past its current state by expanding its styles and weights, and filling in the character set for increased utility around the world.

With Dargon, Anne-Dauphine Borione has become the scholarship’s tenth recipient: Roxane Gataud (Bely), Juan Bruce (Noort), Quentin Schmerber (Temeraire), Bogidar Mascareñas (Laima), Florian Fecher (Lektorat), Anya Danilova (Rezak), Nina Faulhaber (Aeroplan), Emma Marichal (Ploquine), and Patrycja Walczak (upcoming Poltik). Each of the Gerard Unger Scholarship published typefaces have won awards, including the TDC Certificate of Excellence, D&AD award, ISTD awards, and ED-Awards, among others.

PARTICIPANTS

This year we received 63 submissions from 62 designers living all over the world — representing 36 schools in 25 countries. Forty-three of the families were single script and 20 were multiscript, showcasing ten different scripts.

Merits

More than just the winner, we had some amazing submissions that are worthy of significant recognition and a little something extra from the team. The six promising typeface projects receiving TypeTogether’s merit award are (alphabetically): Citadel by Guocheng Xin, Dilinh by Đông-Trúc Nguyễn, Dulungan by Jad Maza, Lezarde by Lucas Voilquin, Malinali by Sandra Morales, and Tarisel by Martin Brendecke.

These merit winners will be receiving a copy of our book, Building ligatures: the power of type, and Veronika and José will personally reach out to them soon to offer their insights on taking their projects to the next level. Congratulations to these six winners!

Citadel

Guocheng Xin (Shin)
Xin is a typeface designer originally from China who is currently studying typeface design in MATD at the University of Reading. He previously studied graphic design at ArtCenter College of Design, California. During his prior degree courses with Greg Lindy, he developed a palpable curiosity and passion for typeface design. After working as a typeface designer with Latin and Chinese scripts, he has pursued a more global typographical approach and taken on challenges involved with another script in his recent programme at Reading.

Dilinh

Đông-Trúc Nguyễn
Đông-Trúc is a recent graduate from EsadType 22–24 in Amiens, France. Growing up in a small town in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, which was designated as a New Economic Zone in the 1970s to relocate people to less populated areas, she was exposed to different accents and cultures from the North to the South of Vietnam. This nurtured her sensitivity and curiosity toward the Vietnamese language and became the driving force behind her graduation project at EsadType: creating a Vietnamese typeface for editorial use based on linguistic research. She considers type design a medium that reflects her interest in the beauty of language, literature, and culture.

Dulungan

Jad Maza
Jad is a Filipino designer hailing from Iloilo, Philippines. Sparked by a passion project, his type design practice focuses on developing Latin and Baybayin fonts and explores what type designs could look like within the Filipino context. His fonts have been released on international platforms such as Blaze Type and Future Fonts. In 2022, he completed the year-long Type West online postgraduate certificate program in type design by the Letterform Archive, San Francisco. Jad is currently designing brands at And A Half design studio based in Pasig City, Philippines.

Lezarde

Lucas Voilquin
Born in Paris, Lucas now lives in Berlin. He graduated from the 2023 EsadType PostDiploma programme and is now a freelance type and graphic designer. He’s interested in typography from a holistic aspect, especially the influence of industrial printing techniques on letterforms throughout history.

Malinali

Sandra Morales
Sandra is a Mexican type and graphic designer with a profound interest in history and linguistic diversity. This passion inspired her to design Malinali, a type family based on the study of the coexistence between the Nahuatl and Spanish languages, drawing from bilingual Novo-Hispanic medicinal botany texts, and aiming to reflect the cultural and linguistic richness of Mexico. In 2021, her enthusiasm for letterforms led her to Argentina, where she pursued a Master’s degree in Typography at the University of Buenos Aires. She is currently immersed in linguistic research to design typefaces for Mexican indigenous languages and continues to develop her Malinali typeface along with other projects.

Tarisel

Martin Brendecke
Martin comes from Seattle, Washington. After a bachelor’s in agroecology, he decided the best way to save the planet would be to move to France and draw letters. Martin was initially self-taught, attended TypeParis ’22, graduated from EsadType, and is currently completing a master’s degree at Ésad Amiens. During his studies, he rediscovered a lifelong interest in medieval lettering and his recent work has revolved around the theme of hybridisation. When he is not looking at a screen, he might be found stonecarving, playing bagpipes, or turning a guitar into a pile of sawdust.

We were completely blown away by the amount and the quality of the work we received. We want to thank every student who submitted their typefaces to this year’s Gerard Unger Scholarship, and also the teachers and tutors who have helped throughout the process. Your efforts have produced impressive work and you deserve to be very proud. 

What will next year’s Gerard Unger Scholarship hold? We certainly can’t wait to see!