u-turn

If I had to choose just one font (instead of the 52) that I could use instead of Helvetica, then I think that would really have to be Univers. I love it. And I love it because it's so damn difficult to use. In my view, it's the one font that sorts the men from the boys.

It's arguably one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry's art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts - quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Piegnot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989. In 1997, Frutiger and the design staff at Linotype completed a large joint project of completely re-designing and updating the Univers family.

And now to a new discovery (for me at least) - which is the way of this little series: it makes me go out and hunt things down when I get to particular letters and nothing obvious springs to mind.

It's Utopia. It was designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1992, and was intended to solve a number of typographic problems related to office correspondence. This demanded versatility, so Slimbach created a font family with cuts for text, for titles, extra bold for headlines, small caps, all caps with numerals, old face numerals, fractions, ligatures and scientific markings.

Comments

[Yael Landau]

I'm curious about your comment regarding Univers being so tough to use. I'm asking because in my design education, our first year type class required us to do all our projects using only Univers. I know I should probably hate it by now, but like you I choose it as an alternative to Helvetica and never considered it a challenging typeface. I'm open however, to the opportunity of using it more wisely.

[davidthedesigner]

I share your restricted education, Yael: I too was only able to use Univers (and Baskerville as a bonus) when I was studying. The funny thing is, I think it teaches you more.