Background

The ​‘Swiss’ or Inter­na­tion­al school of typog­ra­phy empha­sised clean-ness, read­abil­i­ty and objec­tiv­i­ty. Grids became the order of the day for lay­out and pre­dom­i­nant­ly, sans-serif faces were used.

Adri­an Frutiger and Albert Hol­len­stein, design­ers from Switzer­land, found them­selves work­ing in Paris in the 1950s. Frutiger was espe­cial­ly dis­sat­is­fied with the serif-less faces then avail­able, espe­cial­ly in the con­sis­ten­cy between dif­fer­ent fonts of the same type­face, for exam­ple the way the roman, bold and ital­ic each worked togeth­er.

Deberny & Peignot

By the mid-1950s, the Paris type­founder Deberny & Peignot knew that the future did not lay in met­al types.

Charles Peignot, in charge of the foundry made an agree­ment to sell the Lumi­type (known else­where as the Pho­ton), itself a French inven­tion to use light and film to cre­ate orig­i­nals for off­set litho print­ing rather than met­al types. Since the machines used pho­to­graph­ic mas­ters, indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters could be enlarged, reduced, slant­ed and bold­ened.

Peignot now need­ed a superb face that could be cut in met­al for his tra­di­tion­al busi­ness, and show off the capa­bil­i­ties of the Lumi­type. Adri­an Frutiger, art direc­tor at Deberny & Peignot since 1952 was asked to cre­ate a new face and the result was Univers.

Characteristics of Univers

Frutiger con­sid­ered faces like Futu­ra to have a weak­ness: their adher­ence to geo­met­ric forms com­pro­mised on read­abil­i­ty.

A pure­ly geo­met­ric char­ac­ter is unac­cept­able in the long run, for the hor­i­zon­tal lines appear thick­er to the eye than the ver­ti­cal ones; an O rep­re­sent­ed by a per­fect cir­cle strikes us as shape­less and has a dis­turb­ing effect on the word as a whole.

– Adri­an Frutiger

Indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters don’t slav­ish­ly have lines of the same width, there are minor changes to the width to enhance the hor­i­zon­tal flow of each line. This cor­rects an opti­cal illu­sion where hor­i­zon­tal lines appear to have a greater weight than ver­ti­cal lines.

Univers’ x‑height is rel­a­tive­ly large, and a very sub­tle width increase at the foot of some let­ters gives the impres­sion the face is ​‘hold­ing’ on to the line. Fig­ures for Univers are wider for their height than either Gill or Grotesque, again enhanc­ing over­all read­abil­i­ty.

For any sin­gle vari­ant of Univers, the impact is to give a very even ​‘colour’ of pages — no awk­ward char­ac­ter design (com­pare Mono­type Grotesque low­er case ​‘g’ with the Univers ver­sion) and well-con­sid­ered spac­ing between char­ac­ters means the eye is not drawn to par­tic­u­lar parts of the type or spaces between char­ac­ters.

Rational Variant Naming

A fur­ther inno­va­tion was to dis­pense with the usu­al word­ing to describe each vari­ant of the face — roman, ital­ic, con­densed, expand­ed — and replace this with a ratio­nal sys­tem.

On the matrix of fonts –

• Rows rep­re­sent the weight of the face, the light­est at the top and heav­i­est at the bot­tom. This is the first dig­it of the ref­er­ence: start­ing with 3x for the light­est and 8x for the heav­i­est.
• Columns rep­re­sent the width of each face, the most expand­ed being on the left, and nar­row­est on the right. These car­ry an odd num­ber ref­er­ence for roman weights and even num­bers for ital­ic. x3 being the widest face and x9 being the nar­row­est. With­in this range x6 and x8 are the ital­ics.

This unusu­al and log­i­cal sys­tem means that fur­ther vari­ants can be imag­ined — a very heavy, but very con­densed ital­ic would car­ry a ref­er­ence of 88, for exam­ple.

Two prob­lems arose, though, from this. As print­ers took deliv­ery of Univers, it sat in cas­es that were part­ners to Gill, Grotesque and oth­er sans-serif faces. Print­ers sim­ply added their own nam­ing to make sense of the new faces in the con­text of what was already in the case room. Sim­i­lar­ly, UK type­founders tried to attach names to the vari­ants, so Mould­type offered ​‘Univers Medi­um Extra Con­densed’, and Bold, Extra Bold and Ultra Bold ver­sions of faces.

Sec­ond­ly, Mono­type decid­ed to main­tain their strict sequen­tial num­ber­ing of their ref­er­ences, so Univers Bold Con­densed Ital­ic, (Frutiger ref­er­ence 68) was Mono­type ref­er­ence 694‑I while the next high­est in Frutiger’s series (Bold Expand­ed, ref­er­ence 73) was Mono­type ref­er­ence 692.

Thus, a wor­thy attempt to bring order to the chaot­ic des­ig­na­tion of type weights and widths was allowed to fail.

Alexan­der Law­son in Anato­my of a Type­face

Other Serif-less Types

Univers was not the only serif-less face hit­ting the mar­ket in the late 1950s. Mer­ca­tor was offered by Type­foundy Ams­ter­dam, Folio by Bauer in Ger­many, and Neue Haas-Grotesk by Haas’sche foundry, of Basel, all in 1957.

In 1958, Nebi­lo of Italy issued Rec­ta, designed by Aldo Novarase.

Industry Response

Mono­type was plan­ning to rein­vig­o­rate their line of Grotesques, but when pre­sent­ed with Frutiger’s design, John Drey­fus of Mono­type agreed that they should offer Univers. The sheer vari­ety of the 21 styles meant that this exer­cise had a mate­r­i­al impact on Mono­type­’s over­all pro­duc­tion of matri­ces, but the out­come was the most suc­cess­ful Mono­type face issued since World War II.

Stephen­son, Blake were in a more dif­fi­cult posi­tion. They had realised that they were unable to invest in design­ing their own face from scratch, or buy­ing a face from anoth­er founder to cast in their own works. They need­ed a refreshed serif-less offer­ing, and knew that when those were being offered by the indus­try they usu­al­ly includ­ed mechan­i­cal com­po­si­tion (through Linotype/Intertype and Mono­type) and pho­to­graph­ic com­po­si­tion as well.

They chose to re-issue some of their old­er grotesque faces and set to work on their own offer­ings. Impact and Ado­nis were amongst the last faces issued by Stephen­son Blake in met­al. Impact was designed by Geof­frey Lee and issued in 1965. Andre Cret­ton had designed Ado­nis for pho­to­com­po­si­tion by Type­foundry Ams­ter­dam in 1962, and the design was bought by SB to issue in met­al in 1971.

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Location

Address of Deberny & Peignot, 18 rue Fer­rus, Paris 14 foundry that com­mis­sioned Univers.

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Head­er Image: ​“Univers, diver­tisse­ments typographiques” flickr pho­to by Amper­sand Press Lab https://flickr.com/photos/ampersandpresslab/49925207018 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC) license