Grato Marker is not just a new typeface—it’s a spirited typographic innovation from TypeMates, co-created with the Slovenian designer Teja Smrekar. In a landscape often dominated by sterile sans-serifs and overly rigid digital fonts, Grato Marker introduces an invigorating element of personality and charm. It stands out with its idiosyncratic lines, quirky slants, and dynamic rhythm, offering a delightful alternative to more conventional type families. This expressive font is designed as a whimsical companion to Grato Classic and Grato Grotesk, two clean and geometric siblings in the Grato family. But while it complements them perfectly, Grato Marker also asserts its own identity as a fully independent and capable type system.
Grato Marker is imbued with an intentional imperfection that lends it a tactile quality rare in today’s digital typography. Its vertically tilted strokes, bouncing baselines, and loosely proportioned characters echo the spontaneity of handwritten text. These characteristics, paired with sophisticated design intelligence, make it a hybrid of charm and precision. The result is a hand-drawn typeface that doesn’t compromise on function. It’s versatile enough to serve branding, editorial, children’s media, and packaging—bringing a sense of play without sacrificing professionalism.
The Inspiration Behind a Lively Typeface
The conceptual genesis of Grato Marker is an exemplar of modern type design deeply rooted in the analog tradition. At its core, this font is a result of tactility, intuition, and an appreciation for imperfection. Designed in collaboration between Teja Smrekar and TypeMates' Jakob Runge, Grato Marker emerged as a response to the desire for a typeface that bridged the gap between geometric clarity and expressive handwriting. While its origins lie in the structured forms of the Grato type family, this iteration sought to break those boundaries and embrace the soulfulness of human gesture.
What makes the story of Grato Marker so compelling is its rejection of immediacy in favor of process. Instead of diving directly into digital tooling, the designers initiated their exploration with physical materials. This analog-first approach allowed them to reconnect with the foundations of lettering: ink, texture, rhythm, and instinct. They experimented with an array of traditional writing implements—felt-tip markers, technical pens, brush pens—each offering distinct personality traits, each shaping the outcome in subtle yet meaningful ways.
This phase of analog exploration was not simply about aesthetic inspiration—it was about capturing energy. Teja and Jakob meticulously analyzed how different tools impacted form. They considered the drag of a pen tip, the drying patterns of ink, the unpredictable thicks and thins created by pressure shifts. The focus extended beyond appearance to motion, to the emotional residue left behind by a real hand. These observations informed not just the letterforms themselves but also the typeface’s rhythm, proportions, and voice.
Reimagining Handwriting in the Digital Age
Bringing the raw expressiveness of analog handwriting into a digital environment is an intricate undertaking. Teja Smrekar, known for her precise yet organic design ethos, understood that mere replication was not enough. The goal was translation—not copying what the hand created, but preserving its essence in a form that could be refined, interpolated, and scaled across platforms and weights.
To accomplish this, the team evaluated several approaches, weighing the fidelity of digital brushes, the capabilities of vector tools, and the limitations of scan-based outlines. Eventually, they turned to digital drawing tablets with pen pressure sensitivity. This allowed them to mirror the nuanced gestures of handwriting, from fluid swells in downstrokes to delicate flicks at the end of ascenders and descenders.
This technique gave the design team the control and flexibility needed to create consistent outlines while still evoking the spontaneity of the original hand-drawn sketches. Unlike traditional geometric sans-serifs, Grato Marker’s strokes don't follow mechanical paths—they react to invisible tensions and momentary decisions. This subtle variability is what gives the typeface its animated, friendly feel.
In digital typography, creating a successful handwritten font is a contradiction in itself. It demands systematizing the unsystematic. Every glyph needs to retain a lively personality but also behave within a typographic system. This required hours of refining anchor points, balancing white space, and testing contextual alternates to ensure the typeface performed flawlessly across environments, languages, and applications.
Crafting Emotional Typography with Technical Precision
As Teja transitioned from analog sketches to digital masters, she began with the lightest weight. This allowed her to focus on structure and gesture without being overwhelmed by stroke thickness. The light version served as the foundation upon which the rest of the typeface would be built. From there, she interpolated the medium and regular weights, establishing a consistent typographic range. The bold weight came last, posing a unique challenge—it had to retain the liveliness and airiness of the lighter styles while accommodating thicker, more saturated forms.
Each character had to be individually optimized, not only to look correct in isolation but to function seamlessly with its neighbors. This process required a rare blend of artistic sensitivity and technical discipline. The result is a carefully calibrated family that shifts weight without losing character. Its visual harmony remains intact across styles, making Grato Marker adaptable for a wide spectrum of design needs, from children’s publishing to packaging and branding.
In addition to its four core weights, Grato Marker includes three stylistic alternates that offer further customization. Designers can switch between variants of key characters, such as a serifed or unhooked ‘l’, a single-story ‘a’, or a two-story ‘g’, allowing for nuanced control over tone and texture. This modularity gives Grato Marker depth beyond its initial impression, making it a highly flexible tool in any typographic arsenal.
Emotional Authenticity Meets Global Accessibility
What sets Grato Marker apart is its commitment to authenticity without sacrificing function. The typeface feels personal—almost handwritten—but operates with the precision and stability of a modern digital font. It evokes warmth and approachability while supporting global communication. Its multilingual capabilities are expansive, including Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, and accommodating over 270 languages, from English to Vietnamese.
Designing a font with such extensive linguistic range is no small feat. Non-Latin scripts often demand different spatial logic, letter construction, and typographic proportions. Rather than force a Latin-based model across all languages, Teja and Jakob crafted culturally sensitive adaptations for each script, ensuring that Grato Marker speaks fluently across borders. This dedication makes the typeface not just expressive but also inclusive, capable of serving international projects without compromise.
This universal appeal is reinforced by Grato Marker’s refined OpenType features. Ligatures, contextual alternates, and stylistic sets allow for a dynamic, personalized text flow. These features empower designers to create layouts that are as unique as the messages they convey, whether in branding, education, editorial, or retail environments.
Humanizing Brands Through Typography
Grato Marker’s stylistic exuberance and technical reliability make it particularly suitable for brands that aim to connect emotionally with their audiences. It shines in applications where sincerity and relatability are key—organic food products, boutique retail, children's media, artisanal packaging, and wellness-oriented businesses. The font brings a human touch that suggests honesty, craftsmanship, and care.
Imagine Grato Marker on the label of a locally made honey jar or across the title of a storybook. Its imperfect strokes don’t suggest error—they imply intent. They signal that something real and thoughtfully made lies behind the visual. This kind of emotional branding resonates in today's marketplace, where consumers increasingly seek meaningful, story-rich experiences.
Moreover, Grato Marker’s compatibility with its Grato Classic and Grato Grotesk counterparts allows for the creation of expansive visual systems. A company could use Grato Classic for body text or data presentation and switch to Grato Marker for headlines and brand touchpoints—creating contrast without inconsistency. The versatility of this approach gives designers more than a font; it provides a complete visual voice.
Challenges That Shaped the Typeface
Behind Grato Marker’s charm lies an immense technical effort. Each weight in the family required over 1,000 glyphs, encompassing not only letters but also punctuation, numerals, mathematical symbols, and language-specific characters. Ensuring that all glyphs remained interpolatable and visually consistent demanded days of alignment, hundreds of test renders, and an extraordinary level of typographic precision.
Teja recalls this part of the project as one of the most challenging. No single glyph stood out as the most difficult—instead, it was the accumulation of micro-decisions, spacing refinements, and compatibility adjustments that made the task monumental. Every character had to align in interpolation models, meaning even the tiniest inconsistency in one master could disrupt the flow across all weights.
This painstaking labor is mostly invisible to the end user, yet it’s what allows the typeface to function so seamlessly. It allows designers to trust that their layout will behave predictably, whether in print or on screen, in English or in Bulgarian. Grato Marker’s delightful casualness is made possible only through deep discipline and relentless iteration.
A Typeface That Embodies Craft and Collaboration
Teja Smrekar often likens the design process of Grato Marker to a musical collaboration. Jakob Runge acted as a typographic conductor, orchestrating the project's broader vision, while she played the role of the lead violinist, infusing the piece with emotional nuance and artisanal flair. The metaphor captures both the harmony of their working relationship and the layered complexity of the finished product.
This collaborative dynamic allowed each contributor to focus on their strengths while pushing the project further than either could have taken it alone. Teja brought deep insight into the subtleties of calligraphy and analog gesture. Jakob provided a strong conceptual foundation and technical foresight. The result is a typeface that is both highly expressive and structurally sound.
Their shared commitment to process—taking the time to experiment, to question assumptions, and to solve technical puzzles—ensured that Grato Marker wasn’t rushed into existence. It was shaped gradually, with a deliberate pace that honored the craftsmanship involved. This patience is evident in the typeface’s quality, its clarity, and its contagious personality.
A New Standard in Expressive Typography
Grato Marker is now available for licensing on the TypeMates website, where designers can purchase it as a complete family or select individual weights based on project needs. With its accessible pricing, extended language support, and stylistic versatility, it sets a new benchmark for what a handwritten digital typeface can achieve.
It stands as a reminder that type design doesn’t need to be cold or mechanical to be modern and useful. Instead, it can be rich with character, story, and human emotion. In a design world that often values automation and uniformity, Grato Marker brings something refreshingly real—something unafraid to wiggle, to bounce, to breathe.
This is more than a font. It is a celebration of craftsmanship, collaboration, and the joy of expressive communication. Whether in print or digital, local or global, casual or refined, Grato Marker proves that typography can do more than convey words—it can express the soul behind them.
Harmonizing Analog Roots with Digital Mastery
Grato Marker is not merely a typeface—it is an eloquent blend of handmade tradition and precise digital engineering. The typeface’s most captivating trait is that it feels as though it was written with a real pen by a real hand. And that illusion is no accident. It results from an ambitious design approach, one that merges analog sensitivity with advanced typographic technology. When Teja Smrekar joined forces with Jakob Runge of TypeMates, they faced the unique challenge of rendering an organic, expressive concept within the rigorous architecture of a typeface family. Their solution? Embracing digital pen pressure technology to closely simulate the spontaneity of ink on paper.
In typographic terms, this decision was radical and foundational. Instead of relying on traditional bezier curve drawing alone, Teja used a pressure-sensitive stylus, which brought subtle pressure dynamics into every stroke. It wasn't simply about drawing characters—it was about performing them. Each letterform became the result of physical movement, pressure modulation, and intentional imperfection. This resulted in glyphs that didn’t just look handwritten, but actually behaved like handwriting, with swelling curves, gentle tapers, and irregular edges that feel alive, not artificial.
A Gesture-Driven Design Process
The creative journey began with the lightest weight of the typeface. This approach gave Teja the flexibility to define the skeletal structure of each character without being burdened by heavy stroke contrast. Light weights often reveal structural flaws, so beginning here allowed her to iron out the rhythm and proportions of each glyph in its most transparent form. These skeletal designs were then interpolated to form the regular and medium weights. This interpolation wasn’t automatic—it demanded constant oversight to preserve the integrity of curves, ensure alignment across related characters, and retain a smooth evolution from thin to thick.
The bold version, designed last, introduced an entirely new level of complexity. It required significant visual adjustments, especially to maintain legibility and consistency with the lighter styles. The bold characters needed to be denser without becoming claustrophobic or distorted. Maintaining the character’s playfulness while increasing weight posed a unique challenge. Yet the final result managed to retain Grato Marker's trademark looseness and animation across the weight spectrum.
Designing an Interpolatable Typeface with Organic Flair
Grato Marker’s identity as a variable typeface added another intricate layer to the design process. A variable font needs to interpolate smoothly between weights and styles, and that demands a level of mathematical precision far beyond what casual observers might expect from a whimsical design. The final family includes over 1,000 glyphs per weight, each requiring exact point placement to enable seamless transitions between styles.
What makes this accomplishment truly exceptional is that Grato Marker isn’t built from sterile geometry. It’s a collection of gestural, non-connected letterforms. That makes interpolation exponentially more difficult. For interpolation to work flawlessly, every version of a glyph—from light to bold—must have exactly the same number of anchor points, placed in matching positions along the character’s outline. Any deviation can cause rendering glitches or unnatural distortions when the font morphs between styles.
Teja had to scrutinize every glyph and often adjust by hand. Whether she was aligning the finial of a lowercase ‘r’ or managing the bowl shape of an uppercase ‘B’, she had to ensure that each anchor point and curve handled transitions gracefully. Every letter became a tiny system within a larger framework. The more natural the glyph appeared on screen, the more hours had gone into engineering its shape behind the scenes.
Orchestrating Technical Sophistication Behind Expressive Form
To the everyday viewer, Grato Marker appears cheerful and spontaneous, but its behind-the-scenes construction tells a very different story. Teja Smrekar operated like a conductor managing a vast typographic symphony. Each glyph was a separate instrument, and the harmonization of all those elements resulted in a rich, cohesive ensemble. From baseline to cap height, every part of the typeface required intense coordination. One small mistake in point alignment could cascade into visual inconsistency or technical instability across multiple weights.
The scope of the work extended beyond the Latin alphabet. Grato Marker supports Greek and Cyrillic scripts as well, each of which required their own unique letterforms. Designing with linguistic sensitivity, Teja made sure each language preserved the same visual voice while adapting to its respective alphabet. This meant not only technical translation but cultural adaptation—ensuring that every reader, no matter the language, felt the same warmth and expressiveness the Latin characters carried.
This multilingual precision involved drawing hundreds of additional glyphs per script and testing them in various combinations. The entire system had to be harmonious and structurally reliable, even in dynamic environments like web interfaces or motion graphics. Every glyph was tested across different rendering engines, scaling contexts, and platforms to ensure fidelity in real-world usage.
Precision Meets Personality in Stylistic Flexibility
A remarkable strength of Grato Marker is its stylistic diversity. In addition to its four core weights—light, regular, medium, and bold—the typeface includes multiple stylistic sets that amplify its adaptability. These stylistic options allow for subtle yet impactful typographic decisions. Designers can switch between different variants of specific characters to better align the tone of their work with the intended mood.
For instance, Grato Marker offers both a serifed and unhooked version of the lowercase ‘l’. One feels slightly more formal, the other more playful. There’s also a single-story version of ‘a’, often preferred in informal or educational contexts, and a distinctive two-story ‘g’ that enhances legibility in dense text settings. Each of these alternates was drawn with the same pressure-sensitive technique, ensuring consistency in character even when styles vary.
These options allow Grato Marker to transition seamlessly between various tone registers. It can serve as a whimsical headline font for a children’s book, a friendly identity for organic product packaging, or even a digital interface font for casual apps and educational games. The availability of such nuanced flexibility makes it an invaluable tool for designers who want control, creativity, and consistency in one package.
Built for Global Communication and Technical Reliability
Grato Marker isn’t just expressive—it’s also remarkably robust. Its design team placed significant emphasis on global accessibility. Supporting over 270 languages, the typeface is truly international. Each language is represented not as an afterthought but as an integral part of the design. Special attention was given to the unique structure and spatial needs of each script, including extended Latin glyphs and specialized diacritics for languages like Vietnamese.
This level of support ensures that Grato Marker can be used confidently in multilingual design systems, global branding campaigns, and international publications. No matter the language or location, the typeface offers a unified visual voice. It speaks with clarity and personality, adapting its gestures to every alphabet without losing its fundamental identity.
The engineering behind this multilingual capacity required sophisticated OpenType programming. From automatic ligatures to contextual alternates, the font includes intelligent behaviors that allow it to flow more naturally in both print and digital settings. These features are not gimmicks—they solve real design problems. They enhance readability, avoid collisions, and support typographic rhythm.
A Design That Feels Alive in Every Context
The genius of Grato Marker lies in how alive it feels. It’s a font that breathes, that moves with your eye, that communicates tone as much as text. This vitality comes from the early decision to center the process on gestural motion, and from the technical discipline that followed to make that motion repeatable and reliable. From marketing to publishing to digital product design, Grato Marker lends a personal, emotionally engaging quality to any layout.
Its ability to maintain its character across weights, styles, and scripts makes it a rare example of expressive typography that doesn't compromise functionality. You can set a website header in bold and a mobile interface in regular, and both will feel like parts of the same voice—warm, unpretentious, and elegant in its looseness.
This is what makes Grato Marker so distinct. It bridges the gap between aesthetic feeling and system-based typography. It welcomes users into the story of the text, while supporting professional standards in layout and design. Few typefaces manage to harmonize emotional texture with digital precision as well as this one.
A Typeface Built for Expression and Flexibility
Grato Marker consists of four primary weights: light, regular, medium, and bold. This compact range was deliberately chosen to support various use cases without overwhelming the user with complexity. The typeface also includes three stylistic alternates that significantly expand its expressive capabilities. Designers can switch to a serifed 'l' for extra emphasis, use a single-story 'a' or unhooked 'j' and 't' for a friendlier tone, or apply a two-story 'g' for increased legibility or typographic flair.
Each character variation has been crafted with the same attention to detail and gestural authenticity. This modularity allows Grato Marker to adapt to different brand voices or publication aesthetics. Whether it's used on educational materials for children, artisanal food packaging, or promotional material for a casual brand, the font can match the emotional register required by the context. It walks a fine line between warmth and readability, artistry and clarity.
This quality also makes it ideal for pairing with more structured sans-serifs. Designers looking to soften the tone of corporate branding or inject a human element into tech-oriented visuals can find a perfect match in Grato Marker. It introduces a layer of personality without derailing the message. Its ability to coexist with minimalist fonts like Grato Classic underscores its value as both a standalone star and a complementary sidekick.
Cultural and Linguistic Range
One of the most remarkable aspects of Grato Marker is its robust language support. The font family covers Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts and includes extended language support for over 270 languages, including Vietnamese. This inclusivity is not an afterthought but a core feature that opens up the typeface to global use.
Multilingual typography often requires careful planning, especially when the script involves non-Latin characters with distinct proportions and structural conventions. In Grato Marker, these scripts have been treated with equal respect and imagination. The playful nature of the font extends gracefully across language systems, offering a consistent voice that resonates across different cultures. Whether you're setting a book title in Bulgarian or creating a playful logo in Greek, the font's character and coherence remain intact.
From Food Labels to Fiction Covers: A Typeface That Travels
Teja Smrekar envisions a bright future for Grato Marker. She dreams of seeing it featured on grocery store packaging—perhaps adorning a tub of Greek yogurt, splashed across a cereal box, or bringing personality to a store flyer. Its friendly and approachable style makes it particularly well-suited to these kinds of tactile, everyday interactions.
But its potential goes far beyond supermarket shelves. Grato Marker would feel equally at home in the pages of a children’s book, framing dialogue in comic strips, or anchoring titles on educational websites. Its warmth and informality also make it a smart choice for lifestyle blogs, handmade product branding, or boutique cafés looking for an authentic visual voice. It thrives anywhere a touch of humanity is needed in typography.
The font doesn’t just decorate—it communicates. It suggests care, personality, and a sense of craftsmanship that resonates with contemporary audiences increasingly drawn to authenticity.
A Rewarding Collaboration and Vision Brought to Life
The development of Grato Marker was a deeply collaborative endeavor. Jakob Runge brought the conceptual vision and strategic direction, while Teja Smrekar infused the project with artisanal discipline and intuitive flair. She often likens their partnership to an orchestra, with Jakob as the conductor and herself as the first violin—translating the grand vision into fine-grained detail and nuance.
The steep learning curve of crafting a typeface that feels handmade but functions digitally was both a challenge and a revelation for Teja. Beyond designing beautiful letterforms, she had to balance complex typographic architecture, interpolation math, and UI considerations. The end result is a meticulously crafted type family that conceals its complexity behind a cheerful and organic face.
For designers and typographers alike, Grato Marker offers a rare combination of fun and functionality. It demonstrates that playfulness can be precise, that informality can be professional, and that digital fonts can still feel deeply human.
Where to Get Grato Marker
Grato Marker is now available for licensing directly through the TypeMates website. Designers can purchase the full family or select individual weights, with pricing starting at €45.99. Its fair pricing and flexible licensing options make it accessible for both freelancers and design studios. Whether you're crafting a new brand identity or revitalizing editorial layouts, this font delivers originality with technical excellence.
Final Thoughts:
Grato Marker is more than a typeface—it is a typographic narrative written in strokes of authenticity, creativity, and innovation. It speaks to an era where digital design often leans toward sterile perfection, and instead reintroduces humanity into lettering. It proves that typography doesn’t need to sacrifice personality to remain functional or professional. With its expressive rhythm, gentle wobble, and human imperfections, Grato Marker manages to evoke the charm of handwritten text while maintaining the reliability required in a digital font system.
The typeface embodies a rare balance. It feels spontaneous, yet it's backed by painstaking craftsmanship. It is whimsical but never messy, informal but never unpolished. Every curve, every bounce, every tilt in Grato Marker was born from deliberate decision-making by designers who understood the value of emotion in design. Teja Smrekar's ability to preserve the essence of real handwriting in a format as rigid and structured as digital type design is a testament to her remarkable skill and sensitivity as a typographer.
Grato Marker isn’t trying to be loud—it’s trying to be real. It doesn’t overwhelm the viewer; it welcomes them. Whether it appears on children’s books, organic food labels, or playful tech interfaces, it brings warmth and familiarity. It helps brands connect more personally with audiences and makes text feel less like code and more like conversation.
Its multilingual support and thoughtful stylistic alternates make it versatile across cultures and industries. The fact that it plays well with the rest of the Grato family only adds to its practical value for designers. You can create visual systems that are dynamic, layered, and full of narrative potential—without needing to resort to separate typefaces that clash in tone.
In a typographic landscape often driven by trends, Grato Marker is a timeless reminder of the joy of writing, the beauty of imperfection, and the enduring value of human touch in design. It’s not just a tool—it’s a voice. A cheerful, honest, and expressive voice that deserves a place in any designer’s toolkit. Grato Marker isn't simply a font you choose for style; it's one you choose for soul.
