The annual Gerard Unger Scholarship helps promising typeface design students develop their careers immediately. 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 their course. This year 63 submissions with 10 different scripts flowed in from all over the world prior to the deadline.

TypeTogether is happy to announce the 2024 Gerard Unger Scholarship winner: the Dargon font family by French native Anne-Dauphine Borione from KABK’s TypeMedia programme. “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.”

Today marks an expansion and refinement of the entire Tablet Gothic family! It now comes in the variable font format as well as OTF, has an increased character set including Vietnamese, and refined shapes. Because of all these new capabilities, we recommend upgrading for those who have the original family — and you can upgrade for free! So grab your new Tablet Gothic now.

When we say that Playpen Sans is where digital excellence meets casual handwriting, we mean it. A lot of hard work went into making Playpen Sans as easygoing and as technologically capable as it is. In this video interview, friend of the TypeTogether team and award-winning graphic and type designer, Laura Meseguer, discusses her involvement in the Playpen Sans project, from starting with a digital tablet, to creating dozens of alternates for each glyph and refining eccentricities into usable characters.

Playpen Sans has seven versions of each casual character, a built-in shuffler so no single shape is repeated in close proximity, and emojis. The result is text with spontaneous inconsistencies that feel fun and organic, all from the basis of Laura’s talented hand drawings and completed by the TypeTogether team. Watch the video interview at the link below.

More than two years ago we began our intense team research into how handwriting is taught around the (Latin-based) world. Once most of the research was completed for more than 40 countries, we announced the release of our Primarium.info website. We followed it up with the casual Playpen Sans typeface, which used some of Primarium’s practical lessons, and we hinted at more to come. Well, today is that day.

Along with our partners at Google Fonts, we are proud to announce our new Playwrite family: a free, versatile typeface for handwriting instruction, localised by nation and available on Google Fonts. Teaching handwriting in Slovakia, Nigeria, or Tanzania? Just download that family and start using it immediately in your lessons. Each family comes as a variable font or as the OpenType static files with the glyphs and letterforms that are most familiar to each country.

There’s way more candy in this typographical piñata, so open it for yourself, download the Playwrite families for free, and join us in celebrating all the colleagues who have given so much to this groundbreaking process.

We introduced you to Emma Marichal in 2022 when she won the Gerard Unger Scholarship for her Ploquine typeface, developed while studying at Esad d’Amiens under Sébastien Morlighem’s tutoring. After months of work to expand the family and perfect the variable fonts, we have just released it and hope you appreciate the same expressive joy and usefulness we found in it. Her video interview covers a bit of her history, her process, and her hopes for the Ploquine family.