The Sans Serif Typefaces

The developments continued in America and especially in Switzerland. Artists worked on a typographic form which would have been impossible without the sans serif: the Swiss style. It entailed a gradual departure from constructed typefaces like Futura and Erbar and a rediscovery of the old late 19th century sans serifs.

What resulted were typefaces that represented the third phase of the development of the sans serif style: Folio, Helvetica and Univers, all from 1957. Folio was designed by Konrad F. Bauer and Walter Baum. They could draw on the experience of almost 100 years of developments and their model, the Breite Grotesk, was from the year 1867. Max Miedinger used the so-called Schelter-Grotesk (1880) as the model for his Helvetica. Univers, by Adrian Frutiger, with its strongly emphasized thick-thin contrasts and somewhat angular ovals, had no typical models. The first designs for this kind of sans serif typeface family were created in 1950 at the Zurich School of Fine Arts.

Since this time sans serifs have been a typographical standard and one cannot imagine the everyday world of letters, advertisements and posters without them. Discussions were no longer about “sans serif versus serif”, rather about “which sans serif”.

Meanwhile the world has seen three revivals of Futura, a new interpretation of Gill, the predominance of Helvetica over Standard Series and endless expansions of the Univers typeface family.