Product Code Database
Univers () is a sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957.Meggs, Philip B. (1998). "Meggs' History of Graphic Design - 4th Edition". John Wiley & Sons. p.361. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, it was notable for its availability from the moment of its launch in a comprehensive range of weights and widths. The original marketing for Univers deliberately referenced the periodic table to emphasise its scope.
Univers was one of the first typeface families to fulfil the idea that a typeface should form a family of consistent, related designs. Past sans-serif designs such as Gill Sans had much greater differences between weights, while loose families such as American Type Founders' Franklin Gothic family often were advertised under different names for each style, to emphasise that they were not completely matching. By creating a matched range of styles and weights, Univers allowed documents to be created in one consistent typeface for all text, making it easier to artistically set documents in sans-serif type. This matched the desire among practitioners of the "Swiss style" of typography for neutral sans-serif typefaces avoiding artistic excesses.
The design concept of Univers was intended to take advantage of the new technology of phototypesetting, in which fonts were stored as glass discs rather than as solid metal type and matrices for every size to be used. Deberny & Peignot had established itself as a leader in this technology, although as by the time of its launch metal type was still very popular, the design was also released in this form. Univers was rapidly licensed and re-released by Monotype Imaging, Linotype, American Type Founders, IBM and others for phototypesetting, for metal type and reproduction by typewriter. Historian James Mosley has described it as "probably the last major" release of a large family as metal type.
Univers was released after a long period in which geometric typefaces such as Futura had been popular. Frutiger disliked purely geometric designs, finding them too rigid, following a common school of thought among Swiss designers of the period. While studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) in Zürich, he had begun to sketch a revived grotesque family based on 19th-century grotesques, at the time considered antiquated outside Switzerland. He described Univers in 1998 as having a 'visual sensitivity between thick and thin' strokes, avoiding perfect geometry.
Different weights and variations within the type family are designated by the use of numbers rather than names, a system since adopted by Frutiger for other type designs. Frutiger envisioned a large family with multiple widths and weights that maintained a unified design idiom. However, the actual typeface names within Univers family include both number and letter suffixes. The design, with a working title of Monde, was developed from 1953 to a final release in 1957.
Like most grotesque and neo-grotesque sans-serifs, Univers's slanted form is an Oblique type, in which the letterforms are slanted, with minor corrections but no other major alterations. This is different from a Italic type, in which the letterforms become modified to resemble handwriting more. In the original design, Frutiger chose Oblique type with the extremely aggressive slant of sixteen degrees, which was reduced to twelve in some later releases. Linotype Univers (below) returns to the original angle.
Frutiger's original ampersand was a true 'et' ligature, similar to that in Trebuchet MS among others. Frutiger later provided an alternative for non French-speaking countries in which the form might be less familiar.
The Deberny & Peignot library was acquired in 1972 by Haas Type Foundry. It was transferred into the D. Stempel AG and Linotype collection in 1985 and 1989 respectively upon the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei's acquisition and closure; it is now owned by Monotype Imaging following its purchase of Linotype GmbH in 2007. An independent version of Univers was licensed by the Berthold Type Foundry for its phototypesetting system with adaptations by Günter Gerhard Lange; Frutiger wrote in his autobiography that he had some affection for it.
Frutiger himself has commented: "Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket." Walter Tracy described it as better proportioned for text than Helvetica: "more original and subtle in its modelling than Helvetica and, because its character spacing was properly done, a better performer in text composition." Mosley has described its even design as "rather bland" and noted that Monotype's eccentric, chaotically organised Grotesque family remained popular with more "iconoclastic" printers in the 1960s. Stephen Coles describes Univers as "in some ways, even more spare than (no beards or tails)" and Simon Loxley comments that Helvetica "escapes the chilliness of Univers...it does have some elusive quality that gives it a friendlier feel". Dutch font designer Martin Majoor, while praising Univers for its "almost scientific" range of weights, criticised it for its lack of originality: "basing a sans serif on another is rather cheap." Frutiger's later landmark sans-serif designs, Avenir and Frutiger, would take very different, more humanist and geometric approaches.
Audi Sans is a variant based on Univers, designed by Ole Schäfer. It became Audi's corporate identity font in the 1990sNeil Macmillan. An A-Z of Type Designers, p29-30. 2006. Laurence King Publishing / when Audi contracted MetaDesign to support Audi's brand management strategy. The font was used extensively by Audi, appearing in sales literature, corporate communications, owners' documentation and even on the vehicles themselves in the instrument panel graphics and their MMI dashboard displays.
The number used in a font is a concatenation of two numbers. The first digit defines weight, while the second defines width and whether it is oblique or not.
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(note: oblique type is not strict italic type)
As an example, the number 56 denotes the normal weight (a first digit of 5) and an oblique style with the normal width (a second digit of 6).
Due to some typeface manufacturers’ failure to understand and implement the system correctly, however, things have actually become more confusing. To further complicate matters, the numbering system is not consistently applied to the Univers font family. In older publications, all oblique fonts have even-numbered 2nd values; but in digital versions, both odd and even 2nd values have been used on oblique fonts, but not in all font formats or weights. For example, Univers 55 Roman Oblique has both Windows menu names and PostScript full names as Univers LT 55 Oblique and Univers 56 Oblique, but only for the Windows PostScript version of the font; however, in Univers 85 Extra Black Oblique, there is no font named Univers 86 in any format. Nevertheless, oblique Univers fonts always have even-numbered 2nd value.
Inconsistent usage aside, the syntax of 2nd value is also inconsistent with 1st value. Bigger 1st value implies the glyph of a given character uses more horizontal space, but it has opposite meaning in 2nd value.
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Unlike the original Univers, tilted fonts in Linotype Univers and derivative font families have not been named 'oblique'.
Although Univers was originally conceived to take advantage of the cost-saving properties of phototypesetting (Deberny & Peignot, hoping to leapfrog their competitors by taking full advantage of the new technology, advertised their Lumitype glass master discs as each replacing three tons of brass matrices), Deberny & Peignot arranged licensing deals with type foundries such as Monotype for wider release. Univers was quite successful in metal type, with several weights among Monotype's best-selling of all time despite being released at the very end of the metal type era, although Frutiger felt that the Monotype version, which some later versions copied, was limited by the antiquated Monotype technical system.
Several pirate versions of Univers have been released taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection of typeface designs. One unusual modified version was "Univers Flair", a 1970s phototype clone from Phil Martin's "Alphabet Innovations", adding ostentatious swashes. Frutiger, who found it amusing, placed a specimen on his office wall.
In addition to extra font width and weight combinations, the fonts are digitally interpolated, so that character widths scale uniformly with changing font weights. For fonts within a specific font weight, caps height, x-height, ascender and descender heights are the same. For oblique fonts, the slope is increased from 12° to the 16° of Frutiger's original drawings, and the character widths were adjusted optically. In addition, characters such as &, ®, euro sign, are redesigned, the ampersand to Frutiger's preferred true et ligature.
The font family includes all fonts previously released under the Linotype Univers title.
The font family includes 12 fonts (330, 331, 430, 431, 530, 531, 630, 631, 730, 731, 830, 831) in 6 weights and 1 width, with complementary obliques.
The Cyrillic version was released as Univers Next Cyrillic in OpenType Pro format.
The font family consists of 3 fonts (330, 430, 630) in 3 weights and 1 width, without obliques. OpenType features include fraction, localized forms, proportional figures, contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, initial forms, terminal forms, glyph composition/decomposition, isolated forms, medial forms, required ligatures.
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