Linotype Foundry - gerard unger - neue swift type specimen - issue n°1
Neue Swift John L. Waters
Robin Kinross
A short story by John Burroughs
Reputations: Gerard Unger
Technology, Aestethics and Type
The Chimney Swift
page 4
page 9
page 12
Neue Swift
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Neue Bold Size: 146 pt
designer: Gerard Unger dates: 1985 (first design) 1995 (postscript update) 2009 (LT Neue Swift) foundry: Linotype classification: Transitional Serif
Italic - Bold Size: 12 pt Leading: 12 pt
Introduction
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Swift Lightning-fast swifts draw lines and exciting arcs in the air – an example for the designer’s hand ùand pencil.
Unger had already created a number of original typefaces for Hell before he conceived of Swift. But Swift proba-
Their long, graceful wings and short, firm bodies give striking silhouettes, echoed in these letters with their large serifs and pronounced shapes.
bly made the biggest impact of all his designs.
It would be difficult to describe Neue Swift as a redesign of the classic Swift typeface family. Neue Swift is not so much a new design as it is a significant upgrade. During the early 1980s, Gerard Unger first designed Swift for a company named Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH. Known as “Hell” for short (a surname meaning “bright” in German), this company produced the very first digital typesetting machine – the Digiset, back in 1968. Hell had clients the world over, many of them in the newspaper industry.
The Swift family brought in a breath of fresh air to 1980s newspaper design. In the past 25 years, Swift has achieved such broad use that it may be numbered among the most successful and popular serif typefaces of the 20th century. Linotype, which acquired the Hell company in 1989, has been distributing Swift since the mid1980s. Around 1995, Unger revisited Swift, bringing Swift 2.0 onto the market, distributed on his own. The family had been redrawn from scratch using PostScript outlines; the original Swift had been digitized with the help of the now-defunct IKARUS system.
Recently, Linotype worked together with Unger to create new OpenType fonts based on Swift 2.0. These would not offer small caps and oldstyle figures as separate fonts, like in the days of old PostScript Type1 files. Instead, all typographic features would be accessible as OpenType features, as customers have long-since come to accept! Dubbing these new Swift 2.0 fonts Neue Swift, Linotype also expanded the character set, adding dozens of new glyphs per font. This allows speakers and readers of even more Central and Eastern European languages to set text in the new Swift design.
Book (Italic) Size: 8 pt Leading: 12 pt
Neue Swift
Reputations: Gerard Unger Gerard Unger is a quietly ambitious typeface designer whose fonts have achieved a popularity and ubiquity that few superstar designers can equal. Born in The Netherlands in 1942, he has been involved in digital type design since 1974: for print (Dr-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH, now Linotype Library); for office use (OcZ Nederland, Venlo); and for the screen (Philips Data Systems). Unger studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1963-67 and he has taught there for more than 30 years. Since 1994 he has been a visiting professor of typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading in the UK.
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Bold Size: 48 pt Leading: 60 pt
Light Size: 18 pt Leading: 24 pt
Reputations: Gerard Unger Bold Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Semibold Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Black Condensed Size: 14 pt Leading: 20 pt
Book Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Light Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
5 The many typefaces he has designed include Hollander (1983), Flora (1984), Swift (1984-86), Swift 2.0 (1996), Amerigo (1986), Oranda (1986), Argo (1991), Gulliver (1993), Paradox (1998), Coranto (1999) and Vesta (2001), a new sans serif. Many of these are used internationally in newspapers and magazines: for example Coranto for The Scotsman and the Brazilian newspaper Valor, launched in 2000; Gulliver for USA Today and Stuttgarter Zeitung. Swift has acquired the status of a late twentiethcentury classic. He has also designed several typefaces for signage, including the one used for the Amsterdam Underground and in 1996, in conjunction with the Leiden-based company n|p|k industrial design, a new face for Dutch road signs,
“Papers have all kinds of information on the same page; very distressing and very joyful; gossip and facts. I wanted to bring that variety, that liveliness into the typeface design.” commissioned by the Dutch tourist organisation ANWB. He made a personal contribution to the tradition of public lettering in Rome when he was commissioned to developing an orientation and information system for the City of Rome’s Jubilee year 2000. He headed a team of six designers, working again in conjunction with n|p|k. Part of this project was a new type family, Capitolium (1998), to be used in seven languages and in different technologies, including public touch screens. Unger also designs corporate identities, magazines, newspapers and books, writes regularly about graphic design and typography and lectures abroad. He claims he is proud to remain an ‘old-fashioned designer, satisfying clients, solving problems,’ continuing a Dutch tradition of text face design for reading. ‘Over the past decade,’ he says, ‘while many designers were producing post-structuralist, post-industrial, deconstructivist designs and more interested in how things look than in what they have to say, I remained interested in content first.’ Awards include the H.N. Werkman prize (1984) and the Maurits EnschedZ prize (1991). He is on the board of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) and is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). His Dutch language book about the the reading process, Terwijl je leest [While you read], was published in 1997 by De Buitenkant in Amsterdam.
Neue Swift
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John L. Walters: When did you first begin to notice type and letterforms?
Gerard Unger: My father worked for a textile manufacturer, Rayon, so I grew up hearing about graphic designers and seeing their products – Rayon Revue by Otto Treuman, for example.
JLW: Was your father a trained artist or designer?
GU: He was the son of a trained typesetter. My father was a commercial man, with a self-taught interest in design and the arts. Publicity was part of his job.
JLW: Were the other members of your family talented?
GU: My eldest sister paints. My eldest brother, who became an art historian, used to communicate with a friend, who is now a famous illustrator, through selfdrawn magazines with comic strips. I was born during the war – dark days. After the battle of Arnhem, in September 1944, our house and much of its contents were damaged, including my father’s library. I was given a lot of parts of books, including some printed by Plantin, copies of Arts et Métiers graphiques and a publication designed by Piet Zwart for the PTT. I can remember myself improving his work liberally with a pencil.
Bold Italic Size: 11 pt Leading: 12 pt
Bold Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
JLW: You used them as scribbling books?
GU: Yes, I scribbled all over Piet Zwart. My father brought things home: catalogues designed by Sandberg; and books, mostly French, as he was a Francophile.
JLW: Did you note other examples of design and type that you wanted to ‘improve’?
GU: One of my part-books was an atlas. I spent hours studying the way mountains were represented. Inspired by Arts et Métiers graphiques, I spent one whole summer holiday designing banknotes for every country in the world – black and white only. I must have been eleven or twelve.
JLW: When did you decide to become a designer?
GU: During my extremely unsuccessful stay in secondary school, I designed posters, programmes and backdrops for most of the school plays.
JLW: You found school difficult?
GU: I suffer from a mild form of dyslexia. I have problems with numbers especially. So, by the time I had gone through the military service, there really was no other choice. I went straight to the Rietveld Academy. I had started drawing type already, after seeing an exhibition of work by Van Krimpen for the Dutch PTT: simple drawings with pencil on paper. I realised that all you need is a pencil and paper and you’re in business. My career started in the classical way, by imitating a master. Semibold Italic Size: 11 pt Leading: 12 pt
Semibold Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Reputations: Gerard Unger
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“I’m from the generation that saw graphic design as problem-solving and I’m still a problem-solver. That’s my first question: ‘What’s your problem?” JLW: What did you learn at the Rietveld? article by John L. Waters First published in Eye Magazine issue no. 40 vol. 10, 2001
GU: You have to realise that education over the past 30 to 35 years has changed enormously. My final show included a poster, an annual report, a menu, a stamp, all kinds of things like that, and one or two special projects. It was a very practical education. Nowadays students do their final show with one single project that is entirely personal … some of them are strange, weird, beautiful, but have hardly anything to do with graphic design. So I think the best part of my education was that it forced one to be flexible. The change in graphic design after 1960 was enormous, so I think they were wise in training us that way.
JLW: So are current educational methods not preparing students for change?
JLW: Was it like that in the 1960s? GU: Much less. Then it was: ‘Graphic design is all right. Advertising is bad. That’s commercial, and commercialism is a dirty word.’ I thought that was all nonsense and I wanted to hear the pros and the cons, and that’s why I followed the lessons of two teachers with opposing opinions. One was from the Piet Zwart direction of design, of The Hague school and the other was a more traditional designer. To have those different view clashing within myself was very instructive.
JLW: They would respond differently to the work? GU: Yes, almost by definition, but I would always try to make what I thought was best for myself. I never tried to please either of them.
JLW: Is the teaching world totally different now?
GU: The emphasis nowadays is much more on personal expression than it was in my time, and I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I’m wrestling with it. When I see a chance to make the things I design more personal I’ll certainly do that, but that’s not the main purpose. I’m from the generation that saw graphic design as problem-solving and I’m still a problem-solver. That’s my first question: ‘What’s your problem?’
GU: Absolutely, though some issues have not disappeared, such as the whole attitude towards branding. There’s still the old division between the commercial and the anti-commercial: people who feel they are more artists and don’t want to be corrupted. I’ve always thought that to be a rather silly notion, because as soon as you accept money for something, whether it’s for a painting or not, it’s a commercial thing – you have sold something.
Italic Size: 11 pt Leading: 12 pt
Light Italic Size: 11 pt Leading: 12 pt
Regular Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Light Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Neue Swift
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Techno Aestethics and type Gerard Unger Wedge-shaped serifs (like the wings of the bird that give Neue Swift its name),
bold Size: 72 pt Leading: 76 pt
bold Size: 42 pt
along with the large x-height and open apertures, were remedies to the poor quality of newspaper printing in the 1980s.
titles, Style and characteristics
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ology Aestethics and type Gerard Unger They also produce a strong horizontal flow, appropriate for quick, easy reading. These functional aspects gave the typeface a very distinctive look.
So distinctive that they were soon seen as aesthetic advantages for branding and magazines, where they added a fresh crispness to text. Gerard Unger, with Linotype, has improved and expanded the typeface over the years, and the current version has more wieghts than the original.
bold Size: 144 pt
regular Size: 72 pt Leading: 76 pt
regular Size: 42 pt
Light From left to right: 21-28 18-20 12-16 8-12
Neue Swift
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the Chimney Swift by John Burroughs
One day a swarm of honey-bees went into my chimney,
and I mounted the stack to see into which flue they had gone. As I craned my neck
trees and stumps, and to frequent only chimneys. A tireless bird, never perching, all day upon the wing, and probably capable of flying one thousand
miles in twenty-four hours, they do not even stop to gather materials for their nests, but snap off the small dry twigs from the tree-tops as they fly by. Confine one of these swifts to a room
and the smallness of the secondary. The wing appears to hinge only at the wrist. The barn swallow lines its rude masonry with feathers, but the swift begins life
on bare twigs, glued together by a glue of home manufacture as adhesive as Spaulding’s. The big chimney of my cabin “Slabsides” of course attracted the chimney swifts, and as it
Weight and Legibility
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Black condensed size: 18 & 12 pt
of twigs, the nest of the chimney swallow, or swift,--honey, soot, and birds’ eggs closely associated. The bees, though in an unused flue, soon found the gas of anthracite
that hovered about the top of the chimney too much for them, and they left. But the swifts are not repelled by smoke. They seem to have entirely abandoned their former nesting-places in hollow
Bold From left to right: 21-28 18-20 12-16 8-12
and it does not perch, but after flying till it becomes bewildered and exhausted, it clings to the side of the wall till it dies. Once, on returning to my room after several days’ absence, I found one in which life seemed nearly extinct; its feet grasped my finger as I removed it from the wall, but its eyes closed, and it seemed about on the point of joining its companion, which lay dead upon the floor. Tossing it into the air, however,
seemed to awaken its wonderful powers of flight, and away it went straight toward the clouds. On the wing the chimney swift looks like an athlete stripped for the race. There is the least appearance of quill and plumage of any of our birds, and, with all its speed and marvelous evolutions, the effect of its flight is stiff and wiry. There appears to be but one joint in the wing, and that next the body. This peculiar inflexible motion of the wings, as if they were little sickles of sheet iron, seems to be owing to the length and
Semibold From left to right: 21-28 18-24 12-16 8-12
was not used in summer, two pairs built their nests in it, and we had the muffled thunder of their wings at all hours of the day and night. One night, when one of the broods was nearly fledged, the nest that held them fell down into the fireplace. Such a din of screeching and chattering as they instantly set up! Neither my dog nor I could sleep. They yelled in chorus, stopping at the end of every halfminute as if upon signal.
Now they were all screeching at the top of their voices, then a sudden, dead silence ensued. Then the din began again, to terminate at the instant as before. If they had been
development of the primary quills
long practicing together, they could not have succeeded better. I never before heard the cry of birds so accurately timed. After a while I got up and put them back up the chimney, and stopped up the throat of the flue with newspapers. The next day one of the parent birds, in bringing food to them, came down the chimney with such force that it passed through the papers
Book From left to right: 21-28 18-24 12-16 8-12
£ Neue Swift
Semibold Size: 754 pt
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Glyphs Table
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Light Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Book Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Bold Size: 10 pt Leading: 12 pt
Francesco D’Agostino
Neue Swift Specimen free copy