A love letter to Univers

There are typefaces everyone reaches for and typefaces you reach for once you have learned to read type. Univers is the second.

It was released the same year as Helvetica, 1957, and it lost the popularity contest almost immediately. Helvetica became the default anyone defaults to. Univers became the one every working type designer quietly admires. The thing I find fascinating, and the reason I keep coming back to it, is that when you actually look at what Adrian Frutiger did in 1957, it was not just a typeface. It was a system, drawn as a coordinate grid, with every weight and width treated as a position on a chart. Variable fonts caught up with him in 2016.

The man who made it

Adrian Frutiger was Swiss, born in 1928 in Unterseen, and he was one of those rare type designers whose career kept producing things that became permanent fixtures of twentieth-century visual life. Univers in 1957. OCR-B in 1968 for machine reading. Frutiger in 1976 for the signage at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Avenir in 1988. Each of them is a touchstone. Most designers get one.

Univers was cut while he was working at Deberny & Peignot in Paris, the French foundry run by Charles Peignot, which had hired him in 1952 after his apprenticeship and early type work in Switzerland. The brief, more or less, was to produce a modern sans-serif family for the new phototypesetting machines Deberny & Peignot were about to release. Frutiger did not treat it as a brief for a typeface. He treated it as a brief for a family, and he drew the whole family at once, which nobody had really done before.

He died in 2015, by which point Univers had been reissued, extended, rebuilt for digital, and had quietly influenced almost every sans-serif system that came after it.

The grid

This is the part of the story that matters most, and the part that usually gets skimmed.

Frutiger laid out Univers as a palette of 21 weights and widths on a numbered chart. Every cut had a two-digit code. The first digit described the weight: 3 for light, 5 for medium or roman, 7 for bold, 9 for ultra-bold. The second digit described the width and posture: odd numbers were upright, even numbers were italic or oblique, 3 was expanded, 5 was normal, 7 was condensed, 9 was ultra-condensed.

Univers 55 was the middle of the chart, the roman. Univers 45 was light. Univers 67 was bold condensed. Univers 66 was bold italic at normal width. You could describe a poster as "Univers 83 for the headline, 45 for the body, 67 for captions" and another designer across the world could match it exactly, because the grid was the shared reference.

Before 1957, typefaces were picked from an ad-hoc list of weights that each foundry named in their own slightly inconsistent way. Bold Condensed in one family did not match Bold Condensed in another. Frutiger's chart turned typographic voice into a coordinate. A position in a two-dimensional space. It was an act of systems thinking applied to something that had never been treated systemically before.

The whole idea of a modern type family, shipped as a comprehensive system with coherent weights and widths across the range, starts here. Neue Helvetica adopted the numerical system in 1983, because it was genuinely the better way to describe what was in the box. Frutiger, Myriad, Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro, and every variable font shipping today owes something to this chart.

The letters

Univers is a neo-grotesque sans-serif, which puts it in the same broad category as Helvetica and Akzidenz-Grotesk, but the details are where it separates itself.

The apertures are more open. Look at the lowercase c, e, s. In Helvetica the terminals curl back in and almost close the aperture, which is part of why Helvetica reads as tight and contained at small sizes and starts to feel claustrophobic at large ones. In Univers the terminals stop earlier and leave the aperture more open. This is the technical reason Univers is more readable at a distance: open apertures survive distance and low resolution in a way that closed apertures do not.

The terminals are cut at an angle, not horizontally. Compare the top of a lowercase c in Helvetica, sliced flat, with the angled cut in Univers. The angled cut is a small thing and it changes the whole feel of the typeface. It makes Univers feel a little less industrial, a little more considered, a little more Parisian than Helvetica's Zurich rationalism.

The capital G has a descending spur. Not a horizontal crossbar cut into the bowl, but a short vertical drop from the bar down into the space below. It is a Frutiger detail and once you notice it you can identify his hand across decades of his work.

The bold weights are not just a thickened version of the roman. Frutiger adjusted the proportions for optical consistency, so the bold feels the same on the page as the roman even though its strokes are carrying much more ink. Every weight in the grid was drawn with that in mind. It is one of the reasons Univers still looks correct at every weight when a lot of typefaces of its era look uneven between their extremes.

The overall letters are slightly narrower than Helvetica, a little less square. The proportions are more refined. Erik Spiekermann has said, in several places and several ways, that Univers is the better typeface on technical merit. Helvetica just won commercially.

Univers and Helvetica

The comparison is unavoidable so it is worth making cleanly.

Both were released in 1957, in adjacent design traditions, with adjacent ambitions. Max Miedinger drew Helvetica at the Haas foundry in Münchenstein. Frutiger drew Univers at Deberny & Peignot in Paris. They are the two great neo-grotesques of the twentieth century and they were born within months of each other.

Helvetica is tighter, more closed, more uniform. The letters are nearly the same width as each other. It has a kind of democratic flatness that made it perfect for postwar corporate identity work and, later, for being set by anyone who opened a word processor and picked the default sans.

Univers is more open, more varied, more deliberate. The letters are not trying to look the same as each other. Each form is adjusted for its own optical needs. It is a typeface that asks slightly more of the person setting it and rewards that attention.

Helvetica won because it was simpler, and because it had Linotype's commercial reach, and because history tends to reward the version of a thing that requires less thought. Univers became the typeface of people who were willing to think about it. Massimo Vignelli set almost everything in Univers for decades. The 1966 NYC Subway Map. The original Bloomingdale's identity. The whole Vignelli Associates body of work is Univers, Helvetica, or Bodoni, and Univers was first in the rotation more often than not.

Where it has lived

Anton Stankowski redrew the Deutsche Bank identity in 1974 using Univers and it has held for decades. Audi has used it through various updates. Swiss Federal Railways used it in their historical signage. Apple's iPod interface used a modified Univers for many years. It lived in Swiss institutional design, international signage systems, and the whole graphic design education tradition that came out of Basel and Zurich.

Linotype Univers arrived in 1997, a comprehensive reworking Frutiger did with Linotype that expanded the original grid to 63 weights. It kept the numerical logic, added OpenType features, and made the family robust enough for modern editorial and identity work. If you are reaching for Univers today, this is where you start.

Why it still works

The reasons Univers has survived are the reasons it worked in 1957. Open apertures. Optically adjusted weights. A coherent system across the whole family. Letters that are trying to be themselves rather than trying to match a grid of sameness.

But the deeper reason, for me, is the chart. Frutiger treated a typeface like a data structure when nobody else was thinking that way. He gave every weight a coordinate and he designed the relationships between coordinates as carefully as he designed the letters themselves. Variable fonts in OpenType, released in 2016, are the technical realisation of the thing he sketched on paper in 1957. A typeface as a coordinate system, not a list.

There is something quietly radical about that. Most type design is about drawing letters. Univers is about drawing a structure within which letters can exist, and then drawing the letters to fit the structure. The first thing is craft. The second thing is engineering. Frutiger did both at the same time and made them feel like the same act.

Helvetica is what you reach for when you want a typeface. Univers is what you reach for when you have learned to notice the spacing.