Unger has been working professionally since 1967 and freelance since 1975. He is a typographer and font designer. Among his fonts are Amerigo, Swift, Capitolium, Coranto, Vesta and BigVesta. Gerard Unger has designed fonts for Dutch road signs. Since 1994, he has been a professor at the University of Reading in England and beginning in 2006, at Leiden University in the Netherlands.