Galerie typo - Univers

Font Designer: Adrian Frutiger, 1957

The font Univers® is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century The typeface has the advantage of having a variety of weights which even combined give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need.
In 1954 the type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif antiqua in serveral weights to the range of the Lumitype-fonts. Adrian Frutiger suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet and instead to develop a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts. Using his old sketches from the School for the Applied Arts, he creates Univers font, which was published with Deberny & Peignot in 1957 and, afterwards, was produced by Linotype. Derberny & Peignot was acquired in 1924 by D. Stempel AG/Linotype and Adrian Frutiger continued to work for Linotype until today.
Univers font was created almost simultaneously with other successful alphabets: Helvetica® (1957) and Optima® (1958). Whereas Helvetica, for example, had a general clarity and a modern, timeless a neutral effect without any conspicuous attributes (lending to its great success), Univers® expressed a factual and cool elegance, a rational competence.
The Univers font family was completely redesigned as a joint project between Adrian Frutiger and Linotype. The result: Linotype Univers – available with 59 weights!

The font Univers combines well with:
Fonts with Old Face proportions, like Janson Text™, Meridien™, Sabon®, Wilke™.
Fonts with Modern Face proportions, like Linotype Centennial®, Walbaum.
Slab serif fonts like Egyptienne F™, Serifa®.
Script and brush fonts like Brush Script, Mistral™, Ruling Script™.
Black letters like Duc de Berry™, Grace™, San Marco™.
Fun fonts like F2F OCRAlexczyk™, Linotype Red Babe™, Linotype Seven™.