Veronika Burian and José Scaglione: about the beginings of TypeTogether

We met at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, UK in the summer of 2003. I remember visiting José at his place, where I also met his wife Fernanda for the first time.

Yes, we met quite a few times during those years, even after Vero­nika moved to London and started working at Dalton Maag.

Then toward the end of 2005, I already knew I wanted to go my own way, even if not necessarily alone. So given our kinship, I asked José if he wanted to set out on this journey with me, since we trusted each other and shared similar typographic tastes and values.

We created a type foundry where we could feature our work as a library that made sense, without the noise produced by a multitude of fonts on large producers’ websites. We had the advantage of our cosmopolitan backgrounds, broad perspective, and language expertise, but we did not imagine the amount of work involved in such an enterprise... we were probably extremely naïve.

Hang on, we were enthusiastic and ambitious, not naïve! The first two years we had our daily jobs because otherwise we would not be able to survive, but at a certain point you just have to jump into the cold water and learn to swim. If we were always afraid, it would never work.

Yes, there were two things that gave us self-confidence in the beginning. We got a big custom job which was very boring but allowed us to invest in our new business. And then, only a few days after we went live with our website, a well-known news­paper designer bought a few licences of Ronnia for The Irish Times. This meant we were doing something right!

When I moved to the US in 2006, we started our first completely collaborative design project, Karmina, which was honoured as a selection for the Letras Latinas type competition. We then understood that we were able to work together remotely and bridge the 9,000-kilometre distance.

t does not feel so long ago, but things were very different 15 years ago – the whole idea of collaborative type design did not even exist as we know it today, let alone the idea of collaboration from a distance of thousands of kilometres. In 2008 at the ATypI conference in Saint Petersburg, I met a type designer who told me, “If someone went near my letters, I would cut off their arms!”

Our original idea, and hence our company name, was not to just publish our own fonts, but also those of friends and colleagues. Among the first designers ­TypeTogether published were our classmates from Reading – Eduardo Berliner, Bart Blubaugh, Pilar Cano, Tom Grace, Wolfgang Homola, Nicolien van der Keur. The idea of collaboration, friendship, and having a trusting relationship with both colleagues and clients was not a business decision as such. It is in our nature.

The Gerard Unger Scholarship, which was originally called the Typeface Publishing Incentive Programme, started in 2014 as a reaction to the fact that many very good designs we encountered during our educational endeavours were never published.

The font industry has expanded quickly over the past few years and companies are hiring fresh graduates as soon as they leave school. Consequently, many creative designs that deserve to be published are ending up lost on a hard drive forever.

Yes, we wanted to help those projects to see the light of day. So we decided to select one typeface project submitted in a competition every year, help the type designer finalise it, and publish it under TypeTogether with our design and publishing guidance and financial support. Then in 2018, Gerard Unger, our teacher, mentor, friend, and a very keen and early supporter of this project, passed away. It was a terrible loss for us and we decided to pay tribute to him by naming the scholarship after him.

Some of these young designers stayed to work with us, such as Roxane Gataud, our first Scholarship recipient. Her Bely typeface is actually used for setting this book, together with Lektorat designed by Florian Fecher, the 2019 winner! And we are in close contact with others as well – Bogidar Mascareñas, Juan Bruce, Quentin Schmerber, Anya Danilova, whose Rezak family will be released shortly, and the latest scholarship recipient, Nina Faulhaber.

We try to be honest with ourselves and with each other, and modest in the sense that we believe the quality of our work should speak for itself. We also want to show that TypeTogether is not just us two working alone; many people are involved in creating a type family. And it is not just the typeface, it is running a foundry as a whole. Without our amazing team it would not really be possible. While we are proud of our work as a company, we also have a ­critic’s view on it and know we can always improve. We tend not to shout, “Hey, look how fantastic we are –”

Yes, Joshua Farmer, our copy­writer and editor, is doing this job for us! [laughs] But seriously, there are factors that we like to call “good karma”. To us it means being fair with your collaborators, your partners, your clients. It starts with seemingly tiny details, such as doing research before printing a few T-shirts to make sure they are fair trade and not using child labour, or giving proper credit to everyone working on one of our typefaces. We try to do the same with everything and this is something we are really proud of.

Although perhaps not expressed as an overt goal, it certainly was not a complete accident either. Equality and respect are crucial to us but we do not follow quotas for their own sake. One example of our early decisions was to give female names, like Bree, Adelle, and Karmina, to our fonts.

Yes, gender equality is a part of our agenda, same as many other social causes. That said, we believe the people we have hired and collabo­rated with are the best, regardless of their gender, religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

Global typography is such a specialised environment that you need to go and find experts where they are. When we decided to start working with other scripts, we were very lucky to have some of the best experts in the type design field join us – Irene Vlachou for Greek, Azza Alameddine for Arabic, Pooja Saxena for Devanagari, and Liu Zhao for Chinese, to name only a few.

The typographic industry is very international and cosmopolitan itself, so working with people who are passionate about type from all over the world can be truly rewarding. Of course it is also very important how we match on a personal level. Sadly, sometimes the collaboration just didn’t work out.

Yes, of course! But I think regret is generally the wrong attitude because mistakes are something to learn from.

In terms of business, we generally agree that our decisions made sense at the time they were made.

However, in terms of design, we are both very critical of our own work, so some projects spend months in a drawer while the idea matures. For example, for years I thought Athelas was the sin of my youth. It took until Apple included it in their operating system for me to finally understand there was something quite nice about it.

Yes, professional type design takes time. Projects need to slowly grow and designers ought to review their decisions over and over to make sure they are adequate.

Even if we work on a custom type design project for a huge company like the Literata family for Google, the team we collaborated with was a handful of gifted designers who were very respectful of our work. At the end of the day, you end up working with people of flesh and bone just like yourself.

I would add that the administrative and legal part of work with big clients can certainly be more tedious than with a small company – especially if you don’t have the expertise yet and don’t know how to read the contracts, for example.

It demands discipline and structure. The foundry grew organically as it required support not only in type design, but also in graphic design, quality assurance, engineering, administration, production, and promotion. Good tools, planned workflow, and communication are important for this. You can’t do things intuitively anymore. Also, people must feel they are an integral part of the team when they don’t see each other on a daily basis. We hold regular online work-related meetings but we also chat regularly about other things, encouraging team members to talk to each other.

Once a year we hold a foundry get-together, usually somewhere in Europe. We have some workshops, presentations, and plenty of time to catch up on a more personal basis. We also organise our extended dinners, usually around ATypI conferences, to bring together the wider TypeTogether family – the designers whose work we publish but who do not work on a daily basis with us. This aspect of bringing people together is really important to us.

Veronika is the boss, that is for sure! [laughs]

José is certainly more diplomatic than me. But I am learning as time goes by.

We also often switch roles in different situations. It is a practice that comes from our collaboration in type design where you want the other person, the one you trust, to look over what you are working on because it is very easy to miss something when you work on your own.

Yes, when working as a duo, you have an extra pair of eyes, which is great and very necessary.

We have a very similar approach to things, not just type design. If we disagree, it usually just means one of us has overlooked something.

FutureBrand agency was hired in 2008 by the Peruvian government to brand the country. They chose Bree and contacted us to create a special version that played around with the idea of the Nazca lines used in the Perú country logo.

Bree was really popular at that time because it was typographic and italic at the same time. It had this playfulness, friendliness, and style that was very appropriate in this case. As a type foundry, we love providing design studios, advertising agencies, and digital developers the typographic assets that make a substantial improvement to their final communication products. The customised Bree Perú font is a good example of the synergy that can be created when foundries and professional type users work together.

It is satisfying to see that this small, independent company we created brings together people from all over the world, and that it is respected. I like the fact that we have a wonderful team we are able to support and foster.

Yes, we managed to create something out of nothing and we get to work on projects we believe are relevant. We are not saving the planet, of course, but we are con­tributing our small part to improve communication between people.

Also, there are very few women entrepreneurs in this field and it makes me proud to be able to act as a role model for young women! I never thought I would achieve something like this, but of course this bears some responsibility. I have to live up to this.

I like that we are trying to push past the current typographic borders to create challenging projects that are not repetitive. We are always striving to do something new and exciting. The whole team is continuously looking for new solutions and trying to reach outside our comfort zones.

In a global crisis where nobody cares about fonts anymore. [laughs] Just kidding... I would like to be positive but I do believe we are facing a future that will be really challenging for mankind in general. But the need to communicate will not disappear. As for the future of the industry, in the past fifteen years so many things have changed, from technology to society, it is almost impossible to predict where we are heading. But I hope TypeTogether will keep going strong.

I like designing fonts, I like working with Veronika and with the team, and I do not want this to stop any time soon. I also think we can contribute our small part to create an understanding about what cultural respect means from the typography point of view in this increasingly global world. I hope we will be able to pursue this educational aspect of our type foundry a bit more in the future.

That type design is not an island. Type design is connected to languages, culture, history, and also to communication and design. Our history is written with typography.

Type design is not about beautiful shapes. It has a reason, it has meaning, it is a part of our culture, our identity. And it will not disappear. It will change like every language changes. There will be new type projects and new fonts, but type design and typography will always be here.

We probably do not need masses of sameness in type design. It is difficult to come up with something original, and it’s even more difficult to predict what will work and what won’t. But yes – definitely – we do need new typefaces!