Univers

UNIVERS

A

ADRIAN FRUTIGER

Adrian Frutiger is one of the most important type designers to emerge since World War II. He is the designer of many notable faces—the best known being the sans serifs Univers and Frutiger—and was one of the first designers to create type for film.

Although Frutiger has said that all his types have Univers as their skeleton he felt, when he came to design a face for the Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy, that Univers seemed dated, with a 1960’s feel. His airport face, originally known as Roissy but renamed Frutiger for its issue to the trade by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1976, is a humanistic sans serif that has been compared to Gill and Johnston types.

Frutiger has created a broad range of typefaces including OCR-B a type for optical character recognition. His 1982 Breughel is an original face almost wholly comprised of curves and fitting into no existing type category. He has embraced new technology and used it to advantage in faces such as Centennial, a modern whose fine serifs are made possible by recent improvements in definition. More than ten years earlier his Iridium had demonstrated that the classical modern face was neither outdated nor necessarily caused legibility problems. Fruti- ger himself is skeptical about theories of legibility. He learned to read with gothic characters without difficulty and says legibility is solely a matter of habit.1 1

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmn opqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 !@#$%^&*() 2

CH TH

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TYPEFACE

To achieve the goal of an expansive, integrated type family, designers must be sensitive to the nuances of each letterform while simultaneously considering the overall system. In the case of Univers, this sophisticated ap- proach to type-family design is supported by a well-considered set of typographical characters. Inspired by his study of the limitations of existing sans serifs, Frutiger began with the assumption that “a purely geometric character is unacceptable in the long run, for 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.”2 By overlapping a Z and a T of the same point size, variation in stroke thickness becomes apparent.

Frutiger’s decision to use different stroke thicknesses for 3

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYy Univers 67 Bold Condensed

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Univers 45 Light Oblique

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Univers 63 Bold Extended

Univers 93 Extra Black Extended

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy Univers 47 Light Condensed

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Univers 55 Roman

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY Univers 85 Extra Black

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz 4

Univers 49 Light Ultra Condensed

XxYyZz

vwxyz

XYZ

the horizontal, diagonals, and verticals was a response to his assessment of visual discrepancies in other type- faces. It is also no coincidence that Frutiger’s interest in creating a functional and efficient type family followed well-documented scientific research done in the 1930s and ‘40s on the mechanics of eye movement during read- ing.3 While Frutiger’s goal was to make letters that fit together so flawlessly that the assemblage formed a new satisfying gestalt, he also deemed it important that individual letterforms remain distinct from one another. “Built up from a geometric basis, the lines must play freely,” Frutiger wrote, “so that the individuals find their own ex- pression and join together in a cohesive structure in word, line, and page.” To maintain the integrity of each let- terform, careful optical adjustments were made, based on the current knowledge of the principles of perception. The c is smaller than the o because in open letters the white space achieves greater penetration into the form, thereby appearing larger. The n is slightly larger than the u because white entering a letterform from the top ap- pears more active than white entering from the bottom. Ascenders and descenders were shortened in comparison with existing typographic norms, and x-heights were increased. Larger x-heights also provided greater legibility, addressing the concern that sans-serif type was more difficult to read than serif type. All of these innovations contributed to the overall harmony among letters, allowing for a smooth line flow.4

Univers 65 Bold

yZz 5

a

The lowercase ‘a’ is likely the most famous and recognizable out of all the characters in Univers. It has a particular teardrop-shaped counter in the lower bowl, and its upper bowl stroke ends in a horizontal. The counter of the upper bowl is more curved than the actual bowl, which is flatter on top. Its tail is not perfectly vertical, it slopes outwards towards the bottom.

Univers features a high x-height, where the lowercase letters are in greater proportion to the uppercase letters.

This allows for the typeface to be particularly legible, something Frutiger strived to prove could be acheived with a sans-serif typeface

co vs.

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R

Xx

The two strokes of the lowercase “k” meet a the stem, unlike many other typefaces where the two strokes lead into the stem and their meeting place cannot be seen.

Frutiger designed each font of the typeface so that it would have a unified color. In order to accomplish this, he made adjustments to characters that would otherwise not have been made. For example, because an open counterform gives the illusion of a wider letter, the lowercase ‘c’ is actually thinner than the closed ‘o’, but they are perceived as being of the same width

k

RQ

x

The uppercase “R” is balanced between its curves and its straight lines. Like most of Univers’s capitals, it is wide.

Its leg is unique in that while the inner side is almost straight, the outside curves out before ending in a small spur. The conncetion between the bowl and the spur is deep and narrow. The stroke of the bowl also thins as it

Despite making the rest of Univers’s fonts non-uniform in width for even color, the @ symbol does not change width depending on font (65 bold vs. 47 light condensed)

@@

The lowercase letters, like the below “y”, feature unusually short descenders compared to most other fonts. This makes the rest of the letter appear much larger in comparison

Unlike most uppercase “Q”s, the “Q” in Univers does not fully lie on the baseline, nor does its tail extend below it.

Its tail, still slightly curved although sometimes appearing straight, sits slightly higher than the baseline, creating negative space between it and the baseline below it. The “Q” is also not circular; its bowl is made of a fatter oval, while the counter inside is a thinner oval.

y

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The quick brown fox jumped ov The quick brown fox jump UNIVERS vs. HELVETICA

Univers and Helvetica were released at similar times (Univers was designed in 1954 but released in 1957, and Helvetica was designed and released in 1957 originally as Neue-Haas Grotesk), and were both based on the same late-19th century typeface, Akzidenz-Grotesk. However, Helvetica updates the principles of Akzidenz-Grotesk for the modern age, using letters of fixed width that are also very similarly shaped. Univers features much greater variation in terms of width and size in order to create a typeface that presents readers with a unified color.

The quick brown fox jum The quick brown f 8

over the lazy dog mped over the lazy dog

umped over the lazy dog n fox jumped over the lazy dog Both Univers and Frutiger were designed by Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger was developed later (1968 to Univers in 1954) at the request of the designers for the direction signage at the Charles de Gaulle airport in France. Because it was designed for signage, it was also designed to be read at a variety of distances, and therefore had to continue to expand upon the “single color” idea that Frutiger began with Univers fourteen years earlier. The design takes what made Univers successful–its cleanliness, simpleness, and legibility–but added a slightly more humanist touch.

UNIVERS vs. FRUTIGER

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aa

UNIVERS vs. HELVETICA Univers’s “a” does not flow quite as much as Helvetica’s; it has places were strokes start and stop, whereas Helvetica’s all merge. The Univers “a” also has a teardrop shaped bowl, while Helvetica’s is a modified teardrop shape instead. The stem of Unvers’s “a” does not really have a spur, though the one on Helvetica’s “a” is quite pronounced.

RR

The “R” in Helvetica is much more stylized than the “R” in Univers. Helvitaca’s “R” is wider, and appears a bit more stretched out than than Univers’s “R”. The leg in Univers’s “R” also features a shallower, more gentle cuve in the leg than the one in Helvetica’s “R”. The spur on Helvetica’s “R” is also more obvious and defined than the one in Univers.

Univers, while featuring an unusually high x-height for the time, actually has a slightly smaller x-height than featured in Helvetica. The letterforms are also slightly wider in Univers than in Helvetica.

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Xx Xx

RR

aa

The “R”s in the two typefaces are drastically different. The “R” in Frutiger is much more condensed than its Univers counterpart. Frutiger’s “R” features a more rounded, shorter bowl and doesn’t have as deep a connection with the leg as the “R” in Univers. Its leg is also completely straight, rather than the gently curving one in Univers (however, it does offer an alternative R glyph that features a leg more similar to the “R” in Univers.

Univers’s “a” is significantly different from the later-designed Frutiger “a”. Frutiger’s “a” is wider than its predecessor, and its bowls and counters all stretch with it. The connection between the bowl and stem of Frutiger’s “a” is slightly thinner, and while the angle of the leg is the same across both, the spur in Univers’s “a” has disappeared from its Frutiger counterpart.

Xx Xx

Univers and Frutiger both feature similar x-heights and their letterforms are also similar width and proportion within the letterforms, though Frutiger’s are slightly thinner.

UNIVERS vs. FRUTIGER 11

REFERENCES 1 Pincus W. Jaspert, The Encyclopaedia of Typefaces. (Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1983), 69-70.

2 Alexander S. Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1990), 304.

3 Jennifer Gibson. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces (New York: RC Publications), 171.

4 Ibid, 173.

5 Linotype Library GmbH, Available at http://www.linotype.com/7-267-7-13347/univers. html Accessed No- vember 1, 2005

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blackwell, Lewis. 20th-Century Type. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. (A&A: Z250.A2 B59 1998 and Vault) Kunz, Willi. Typography: Macro- and Microaesthetics. Sulgen: Verlag Niggli AG, 2000.

(A&A: Z246 .K86 2000 and Vault) Carter, Sebastian. Twentieth Century Type Designers. Great Britain: Lund Humphries, 2002. (A&A: Z250 A2 C364 1995 and Vault) Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces, essays by Carolyn Annand ... [et al.]; edited by Philip B. Meggs and Roy McKelvey, New York: RC Publications, 2000. (A&A: Z250.R45 2000) http://www.linotype.com http://www.fonts.com 12

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