2021 was not as we had hoped, but we were able to meet more, have in-person workshops again, give some talks, and reach many goals. On the foundry side, we continued to make great strides in our multiscript releases (Adelle Sans, Bree, and Noort), and with Postea and Belarius, which have big personalities and distinct aims. As always we have embraced the latest technology, which means creating variable fonts whenever possible and much more.
Last year we pushed global typography further than before: Adelle Sans was extended and offers support for eleven scripts, plus Pan-African (using the Latin script, but with glyphs supporting African languages). Bree is now a five-script family, becoming our second largest family by number of supported scripts, and in 2022/2023 we will see Bree Devanagari join the family. To improve access to these large families, we created landing pages (for Adelle Sans and Bree) that showcase all the scripts and their styles. Juan Bruce’s Noort also received a script extension with our first Bengali design ever. The two very different personalities of Belarius and Postea close the 2021 releases — Postea being a lyrical take on geometric sans serifs with a unique and easily activated icon set; and Belarius as the poignant, variable font shape-shifter that can switch from a sans serif to a slab serif and has infinite widths in between. Belarius, you’ll recall, is also the second in a three-part publishing family: Catalpa, Belarius, and Aneto. Will you see Aneto this year? Yes, yes you will. And your eyes will thank you.
Bree is following a similar path as Adelle Sans and going (more) global. This year we added Bree Arabic (designed by Azza Alameddine) and Bree Thai (designed by Panuwat Usakulwattana of Cadson Demak , and updated Bree Latin to include new Pinyin and revamped Vietnamese (the latest with Donny Truong’s advice). You can read the story here.
Adelle Sans grew by four new scripts: Hebrew (designed by Liron Lavi Turkenich), Lao (designed by Suppakit Chalermlarp), Thai (by Smich Smanloh & Anuthin Wongsunkakon), Georgian (designed by Akaki Razmadze & Jan Charvát), and two updated scripts, Armenian (revamped by Gor Jihanian) and Cyrillic (by Vera Evstafieva). Designed through the joint effort of now three dozen experts, Adelle Sans supports eleven writing systems and over 400 languages. We wrote about it here.
Chilean designer Juan Bruce extended his typeface Noort, a TDC Award of Excellence and Gerard Unger Scholarship-winning design, to provide full support for Bengali. This also happens to be TypeTogether’s first foray into the script. Read more about how Noort Latin got a Bengali companion.
Postea is TypeTogether’s take on a geometric sans. It is a rather small type family, especially when compared with our latest releases. But smaller, in this case, does not mean either simpler or less accomplished. The challenge is represented in the typographic goal of the new typeface: Postea is meant to have outstanding performance in an extremely wide range of situations. And Postea’s icon set covers an incredible range of uses, including wayfinding, communications, and applications such as museums.
Belarius is a three-axis variable family that shifts from sans to slab serif, from condensed to expanded widths, and from light to bold weights, and every possibility in between. Its midrange purpose includes packaging, headlines and subheads, advertising, decks, and pull-quotes. While the Poster styles extend the normal slab serif length with deliberate exaggeration for a unique, crackly texture in headings.
In late 2018 our Chinese partners FounderType approached us with a very interesting project — redesigning a type family for Geely, one of the most important car manufacturers in the world. What started as rather technical work ultimately allowed us to expand our knowledge of branding for the automobile industry, hybrid analogue, digital user interfaces, and legibility.
The commissioned typeface is for use in printed and digital advertisements and in the user interface of the vehicles, including the dashboard, the infotainment system, and the physical switches themselves. It was important to find right inflection point between making the text typeface as squared off as the logo but also as curved as users need for immediate and clear character recognition. You can read about the design process here.
We made a strong push for our TypeTogether Premier service for professional designers who are looking for the right fonts for their pitches and projects. Premier is our way of making it easier for creatives to access and test out any fonts in our library with a one-click trial licence.
Through Premier, designers can be the first to test beta fonts and use them in commercial work before anyone else. Alongside that, we’re creating content to help members keep up to date with typographic developments at TypeTogether and in the industry at large. The service is free for professional designers who are looking to trial fonts for their projects. If you feel this service would be a benefit to you or your team, then read more and apply here.
We continued to publish educational articles, interviews, and other interesting pieces on our blog. Here are some highlights from 2021.
Interviews & articles
Shani Avni, type designer and researcher with a focus on Hebrew type design, investigated and suggested a nomenclature for Hebrew type anatomy in the latest article in our series demystifying letterforms and shapes in scripts from around the world.
In an in-depth article about Arlette, one of the most unique and invigorating multiscript typefaces in our catalogue, designer Pilar Cano gave us a look at their inspiration and design process for the project, right from sketches to the finished typeface.
We interviewed Danielle Evans, best known for her work in “food typography” for design and advertising, about her history, intersecting interests, and the typefaces she loves.
Over 100 languages supported are by Latin, and it is no child’s play to typeset in these different tongues. Specialist Filip Blazek wrote a primer for our blog about the peculiarities of typesetting in Latin-based languages.
We also spoke to Anya Danilova, recipient of the sixth Gerard Unger scholarship, about how she became interested in type design, her upcoming typeface Rezak, and the value of collaboration. Read the interview here.
Type in Use
Take a look at some samples of our fonts being beautifully used by some great designers around the globe: Lektorat in the catalogue exhibition “The sculptures speak”, Catalpa in the new branding for children’s channel Pop UK, Alverata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 150-year celebration website, and Athelas in the fascinating book, A little-known story about a movement, a magazine, and the computer’s arrival in art: New tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973.
Awards
Lektorat, Catalpa, and Literata were awarded the Indigo Awards 2021 Gold. Literata Cyrillic also won the Modern Cyrillic 2021 award, wh Bree Cyrillic was shortlisted. Belarius received the Clap Platinum in best display typeface in the Latin-American awards Premios Clap, and Postea was shortlisted in the same category.
Cecilia Brarda’s promotional video for Postea received recognition at the Clap awards, where it was selected in the branding for TV and social media category.
Collectibles
Talented Argentinian designer Cesar Sesio created a series of posters for us. These will be available on our online store from February 2022, and a limited amount of copies were distributed at the MagCulture event in London, with more copies included in the October issue of Page Magazine.
Videos
Our friend Danielle Evans created a wonderful movie for our Bree multiscript releases. Check out the video and learn about how it was done here. Don’t miss the videos that Cecilia Brarda created all year long for our new releases: Noort Bengali, Adelle Sans multiscript, Postea, Bree and many others.
We promised to give away as much as we could in the form of education. Our increase in articles continues to tell this story on its own. We made good on this promise in 2021, and we’ll continue this commitment in 2022.
For the seventh edition of TypeTogether’s Gerard Unger Scholarship, we received 46 submissions from 44 designers living all over the world — representing 25 schools in 13 countries. Nina Faulhaber was the recipient of 2021 Gerard Unger Scholarship for her project, Aeroplan (previously Flieger). Another eight projects were awarded a merit. You can check out all the projects and see more images of Aeroplan here.
Travel was impossible in 2020, so our annual team meeting that happens in-person was sadly cancelled. All the more we cherished finally being able to gather at a work retreat in the invigorating location of Vallfort in August 2021. We enjoyed the fabulous landscape, being surrounded by vineyards of the Penedès wine region in Cataluña, Spain, and were able to accomplish a lot together. Nina and Anya also took part in the meeting, together with the rest of the team. We wrote about it and shared our favourite photographs here.
Workshops & talks
It was a busy year for Veronika. She gave her usual Gjøvik workshop in April, alas, this time online only. She was a keynote speaker at TypographyDay India and gave several talks, including one at the Encuentro de Educación Tipográfica (EET). She was appointed co-chairwoman for Granshan’s Type Design competition and was co-curator & moderator of the TypeTech MeetUp. During Typographics Typelab 2021 she offered a joint talk with Anya Danilova, the winner of the 2020 Gerard Unger Scholarship, about the mentorship we give to the winners of the mentorship programme.
José participated in the 2021 edition of EET in Argentina. He offered a typography masterclass at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL). He also wrote the prologue for the Spanish translation of Gerard Unger’s book Theory of Type Design, published by Campgràfic.
Pooja was part of the D&AD 2021 type design jury and spoke at Adobe Design Shots 2021 about her experiments with AR in sharing typographic stories and knowledge. She spoke at Design Conversation, organised by Design United, and she gave talks at Mumbai Typostammtisch and TypeWknd 2021. She was also a panelist at TypeTech MeetUp and joined forces with other designers from India to provide critique to Indic typeface projects during Typographics Typelab 2021.
Azza facilitated several in-person workshops and talks: at Tipo-g design school in Barcelona, at Tumo in Yerevan, and Masterclass at Misk Art institute in Riyadh.
Joanca was part of the Tipo-g school in Barcelona where he lectured on font technology.
Roxane had a prolific year in workshops and talks. She taught at several French design schools, and was part of the jury at Esad Valence for the graphic design diplomas. She led a workshop in Brussels and also gave a few talks in Canada.
Cecilia gave several online talks and workshops, including a motion storyboard workshop at TypeWknd 2021 and during our own meeting at Penedès.
Elena gave a talk at IED Kunsthal Bilbao at the beginning of 2021. She participated in the ‘Spanish hour’ during the March 8 Around the Globe event, informally organised by Alphabettes. In addition to her continued PhD progress and usual TypeTogether work, Elena keeps updating her newsletter, Circular de tipografía (the last two issues devoted to multiscript typography).
Stay tuned for a productive 2022 — we’re releasing new families (coming soon are Portada Arabic and the winning design of the 2020 Gerard Unger Scholarship, Rezak). The third part of the Catalpa-Belarius-Aneto trilogy is almost ready and other educational articles, including more type anatomy articles, are in the pipeline. And in the next few weeks we’ll complete the printing of our book celebrating fifteen years of (making) type together.
But more than anything, our focus is on partnering with you to make your business an even greater success. Every advancement we make, every opinionated font we create, and every educationally rich article we produce is all meant to make your sphere more influential, branded, positive, and fun. Whether you’re a freelancer just edging into the deep waters of typography or a company of global renown, we value partnerships and helping you move forward. We always have an open door so reach out at any time and let’s connect. It’s gonna be another great year with TypeTogether!
All our best,
The TypeTogether team
TypeTogether is an indie type foundry committed to excellence in type design with a focus on editorial use. Additionally, TypeTogether creates custom type design for corporate use. We invite you to browse our library of retail fonts or contact us to discuss custom type design projects.
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