Univers Case Study

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UNIVERS

Univers is a grotesque, san serif type family, started by Adrian Frutiger in 1954. The acclaimed, French type foundry, Deberny & Peignot released Frutiger’s finished font in 1957. Univers had a profound impact on the landscape of topography and graphic design. It is a good example of excellent Swiss design and emulates neutrality and refreshing charm. Univers was initially, purposely based off and preceded a late 19th century san serif type called Akzidenz Grotesk.
Akzidenz Grotesk was first revealed by German foundry, Berthold AG in 1898. Succeeding the 1920’s, Akzidenz Grotesk was typically utilized by the Swiss style professionals. Because it had a less curvy geometric structure, it was considerably easier to read, and it also …show more content…

Typographers tended to use the same terms that usually did not equate to the same meaning from use to use. So, his new linear typeface Univers was the first to be produced with its own numbering system. Frutiger completed a systematic family of twenty-one san serif fonts. It included a visually structured, color-coded diagram that showed different widths on the horizontal axis and number weights on the vertical axis. The regular weight, with the correct black-and-white relationship, for book settings, is Univers 55. The font family encompasses light/extra condensed, which is Univers 39 through extended/extra bold, which is Univers 83. The fonts to the right of Univers 55 are condensed, to the left are extended, above are lighter weighted and below are heavier weighted. This visual, colored and numbered system eliminated ambiguous phrasing that created design mix-ups. With Univers’s new type family, the palette of typographic diversity was considerably broadened. His numbers altered the traditional classifications. Arian Frutiger worked on Univers for three years, and Deberny & Peignot invested over 200,000 hours to make the 35,000 matrixes necessary to generate all 21 faces of their various

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