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“When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.” —Adrian Frutiger
a
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.
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 More than ten years earlier his Iridium had demonstrated that the classical modern face was neither outdated nor necessarily caused legibility problems. Frutiger 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
History of Univers Adrian Frutiger first became interested in the aspect of type legibility when experiencing and working with type made through the process of metal printing. When designing his typeface Univers however, the process of typeface designed had moved from the traditional metal method to a modern use of photocomposition printing on film. With this new photographic process, the inspiration of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk, and his drive for typeface legibility, Frutiger began designing the Univers typeface family. He designed the typeface with 21 variations and was the first to implement a numbering system to differentiate the variations rather than names. Since then, he has expanded the number of variations up to 27. Due to Univers’ success at varying sizes, the typeface has become very popular. It has been used in various settings such as maps, signage, corporate branding, and even standardized testing. Until 2007, it was the typeface featured on Apple laptops. It is the primary typeface of Germany’s Frankfurt International Airport and the Montreal Metro System. It is also the most used typeface on exams in the UK because of the clear distinction between similar characters such as 1 and I.
2
Univers Type-Family thirty-nine forty-nine fifty-nine forty-seven forty-eight fifty-seven fifty-eight sixty-seven sixty-eight forty-five forty-six fifty-five fifty-six sixty-five sixty-six seventy-five seventy-six eighty-five eighty-six Frutiger’s typeface, Univers, on an apple laptop’s keyboard.
This chart illustrates the numbering system developed by Frutiger.
sixty-three sixty-four seventy-three seventy-four ninety-three ninety-four 3
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 approach 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.” 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 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 reading.
Univers has low stroke contrast. In this example, the strokes on each side of the A differ slightly in length but are designed to look optically equal in the letterform.
4
q
Univers is characterized by short ascenders and descenders.
b h p
a
The rounded letters in Univers are more oval than circular.
5
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 expression and join together in a cohesive structure in word, line, and page.” To maintain the integrity of each letterform, 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 appears 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.
The difference in width between a Univers lowercase o and c is much more noticeable at point size 1000. 6
c
c 7
Univers and Frutiger Univers was a quite successful typeface, used by various corporations and in different settings, but creator Adrian Frutiger thought it seemed outdated by the time he was commissioned to design the signage for the Charles de Gaulle International Airport at Roissy in 1968. So instead, Frutiger set on to design an entirely new typeface with similar qualities to Univers but with more organic and proportional aspects, similar to the typeface Gill Sans which was completed in 1975. Originally called Roissy, now called Frutiger, the new typeface looks deceivingly like Univers at a quick glance but with closer inspection the differences become quite noticeable.
8
C
C
Univers Aa Ee Rr Aa Ee Rr
a
Ausstellung
abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz 012 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Frutiger Aa Ee Rr Aa Ee Rr
a
Accès aux avions abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789
Univers capital C on the left, Frutiger capital C on the right. 9
R R
At the same point size, Univers capital R on the top is wider but only slightly taller giving the letter a box-like quality that is absent in the capital Frutiger R below it. The collection of capitals below show the same characteristics. Univers capitals on the top have a box-like quality in comparison to the Frutiger capitals on the bottom.
J E UG J E UG
gg 10
The Frutiger descenders on the lowercase letters (on right) are quite different from Univers lowercase (on left).
g
Univers
The width in the crotch of the y’s differs slightly while the descender is significantly different.
The width and height of the Q’s are strikingly different, making the Frutiger Q seem a lot more rounded. In addition the direction and shape of the descender is also quite different.
The univers s is wider and has less width variation in the strokes. It also has much smaller open spaces in the letterform.
Similar to the s, the Frutiger e has more rounded strokes and a much wider space in the opening of the letterform.
y Q s e
Frutiger
y Q s e 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/7-267-713347/univers.html Accessed No- vember 1, 2005 http://www.designer-daily.com/10-inspirational-quotes-about-design 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 http://typophile.com https://typekit.com/lists/grotesque-sans-serifs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers
12
This book about the typeface Univers was made by Christian Del Rio as part of her final project in Typography at Washington University in St. Louis. The fonts featured in this book all belong to the Univers typeface family with the exception of Frutiger roman used in the comparison section of Univers and Frutiger. It was printed on an HP Color Laserjet CP6015 printer and assembled by hand. 13
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