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105-476: Univers was one of the first typeface families to fulfil the idea that a typeface should form a family of consistent, related designs. Past sans-serif designs such as Gill Sans had much greater differences between weights, while loose families such as American Type Founders' Franklin Gothic family often were advertised under different names for each style, to emphasise that they were not completely matching. By creating

210-531: A humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston 's 1916 "Underground Alphabet" , the corporate font of London Underground . As a young artist, Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926, Douglas Cleverdon , a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in Bristol , and Gill painted

315-537: A 3-number system is used. First numeral describes font weight, second numeral describes font width, third numeral describes position. Unlike the original Univers, tilted fonts in Linotype Univers and derivative font families have not been named 'oblique'. Versions of Univers have been released for almost every major typesetting system, including versions for a wide range of writing systems and with additional features such as schoolbook characters . Although Univers

420-512: A casting machine to cast type. It was Monotype's standard practice at the time to first engrave a limited number of characters and print proofs (some of which survive) from them to test overall balance of colour and spacing on the page, before completing the remaining characters. Walter Tracy , Rhatigan and Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke have all written that the drawing office's work in making Gill Sans successful has not been fully appreciated; Yorke described Gill as "tactless" in his claims that

525-447: A custom version of Univers until 2009. Univers is used as an official logo in lowercase for UNICEF since 2003. Audi Sans is a variant based on Univers, designed by Ole Schäfer . It became Audi's corporate identity font in the 1990s when Audi contracted MetaDesign to support Audi's brand management strategy. The font was used extensively by Audi, appearing in sales literature, corporate communications, owners' documentation and even on

630-469: A design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time. Designed before setting documents entirely in sans-serif text was common, its standard weight is noticeably bolder than most modern body text fonts. An immediate success, the year after its release the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material. British Railways chose Gill Sans as

735-552: A fascia for the shop for him in sans-serif capitals. In addition, Gill sketched an alphabet for Cleverdon as a guide for him to use for future notices and announcements. By this time Gill had become a prominent stonemason, artist and creator of lettering in his own right and had begun to work on creating typeface designs. Gill was commissioned to develop his alphabet into a full metal type family by his friend Stanley Morison , an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing. Morison hoped that it could be Monotype's competitor to

840-403: A font is a concatenation of two numbers. The first digit defines weight, while the second defines width and whether it is oblique or not. (note: oblique is not strict italic ) As an example, the number 56 denotes the normal weight (a first digit of 5) and an oblique style with the normal width (a second digit of 6). Due to some typeface manufacturers’ failure to understand and implement

945-413: A genre of sans-serif, known as the humanist style. Monotype rapidly expanded the original regular or medium weight into a large family of styles, which it continues to sell. A basic set is included with some Microsoft software and macOS . The proportions of Gill Sans stem from monumental Roman capitals in the upper case, and traditional "old-style" serif letters in the lower. This gives Gill Sans

1050-461: A glass disc font master. Character selection was by means of a trigger mounted on the front of the machine (giving rise to the colloquial naming of the machine as the "duck-shooter" (in the UK at least). When changing font, it was a notable feature of the machine that it required calibration of letter-spacing by the typing of a nonsense character sequence: "Hillimillihirtzheftpflasterentferner". Measuring

1155-459: A great range of alternative designs and releases. A book weight was created in 1993 in between the light and regular weight, suitable for body text, along with a heavy weight. In 1936, Gill and Monotype released an extremely bold sans-serif named Gill Kayo (from KO, or knockout , implying its aggressive build). This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans. Gill, who thought of

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1260-510: A key element of the 'Modernist classical' style from the 1930s to the 1950s, that promoted clean, spare design, often with all-capitals and centred setting of headings. Gill Sans remains popular, although a trend away from it towards grotesque and neo-grotesque typefaces took place around the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of continental and American design. Typefaces that became popular around this time included original early "grotesque" sans-serifs, as well as new and more elegant designs in

1365-535: A large family as metal type . Some of these old sans serifs have had a real renaissance within the last twenty years, once the reaction of the 'New Objectivity' had been overcome. A purely geometrical form of type is unsustainable. Univers is one of a group of neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces, all released in 1957, that includes Folio and Neue Haas Grotesk (later renamed Helvetica ). As all are based on Akzidenz-Grotesk, these three faces are sometimes confused with each other. These typefaces figure prominently in

1470-408: A leader in this technology, although as by the time of its launch metal type was still very popular, the design was also released in this form. Univers was rapidly licensed and re-released by Monotype , Linotype, American Type Founders , IBM and others for phototypesetting, for metal type and reproduction by typewriter. Historian James Mosley has described it as "probably the last major" release of

1575-422: A long affiliation with the company, for which he designed various original typefaces, including Concorde and Imago, and oversaw the foundry's revivals of classic faces such as Garamond , Caslon , Baskerville , and Bodoni . In 1996, Harvey Hunt (1949–2022) and his wife Melissa, reestablished as Berthold Types. In 1997, Berthold Types acquired all of the copyright, trademark and design rights associated with

1680-598: A matched range of styles and weights, Univers allowed documents to be created in one consistent typeface for all text, making it easier to artistically set documents in sans-serif type. This matched the desire among practitioners of the "Swiss style" of typography for neutral sans-serif typefaces avoiding artistic excesses. The design concept of Univers was intended to take advantage of the new technology of phototypesetting , in which fonts were stored as glass discs rather than as solid metal type and matrices for every size to be used. Deberny & Peignot had established itself as

1785-575: A rounded "y", seriffed "1" and lower-case "L" with a turn at the bottom. Infant designs of fonts are often used in education and toys as the letters are thought to be more recognisable to children being based on handwriting, and are often produced to supplement popular families such as Gill Sans, Akzidenz-Grotesk and Bembo . Monotype also created a version with rounded stroke ends for John Lewis for use on toys. The digital releases of Gill Sans fall into several main phases: releases before 2005 (which includes most bundled "system" versions of Gill Sans),

1890-602: A signboard in the style of Gill Sans, which survives in the collection of the St Bride Library . In 1949 the Railway Executive decided on standard types of signs to be used at all stations. Lettering was to use the Gill Sans typeface on a background of the regional colour. Gill Sans was also used in much of its printed output, very often in capitals-only settings for signage. Specially drawn variations were developed by

1995-488: A similar effect for smaller projects; their sans-serif Compacta and Stephenson Blake 's Impact exemplified the design trends of the period by choosing dense, industrial designs. Of the period from the 1930s to 1950s, when he was growing up, James Mosley would later write: The Monotype classics dominated the typographical landscape ... in Britain, at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality

2100-516: A specimen on his office wall. Univers 45, 55, 65, 57, 67, 53 and 63 (regular and bold weights with obliques in regular and condensed widths) are incorporated in the PostScript 3 digital printing standard as core fonts. As part of the Ghostscript project to create a free alternative to PostScript, URW++ donated its clones of these weights under the series name U001, and then as URW Classic Sans under

2205-403: A standard "double-storey" "g". In the regular or roman style of Gill Sans, some letters were simplified from Johnston, with diamond dots becoming round (rectangles in the later light weight) and the lower-case "L" becoming a simple line, but the "a" became more complex with a curving tail in most versions and sizes. In addition, the design was simply refined in general, for example by making

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2310-586: A tail that looped upwards (similar to that on Century among others, and used by the LNER), oblique designs as opposed to the standard true italic, a more curving, true-italic "e" and several alternative numerals. In particular, in the standard designs for Gill Sans the numeral "1", upper-case "i" and lower-case "L" are all a simple vertical line, so an alternative "1" with a serif was sold for number-heavy situations where this could otherwise cause confusion, such as on price-lists. (Not all timetables used it: for example,

2415-535: A typeface that has stood the test of time, we avoid the trap of going down a modish route that might look outdated in several years' time". This was not Gill's only association with the BBC, as he had designed sculptures and other artwork that are on display at the broadcaster's London headquarters, Broadcasting House . In 2017, the BBC began to phase out Gill Sans in favour of a proprietary corporate font family, "Reith" (named after its first general manager John Reith ), which

2520-459: A unified design idiom. However, the actual typeface names within Univers family include both number and letter suffixes. The design, with a working title of Monde , was developed from 1953 to a final release in 1957. Like most grotesque and neo-grotesque sans-serifs, Univers's slanted form is an oblique , in which the letterforms are slanted, with minor corrections but no other major alterations. This

2625-401: A very different style of design to geometric sans-serifs like Futura , based on simple squares and circles, or grotesque or "industrial" designs like Akzidenz-Grotesk , Helvetica and Univers influenced by nineteenth-century lettering styles. For example, compared to grotesque sans-serifs the "C" and "a" have a much less "folded up" structure, with wider apertures . The "a" and "g" in

2730-464: A very wide range of sizes and weights. Despite the popularity of Gill Sans, some reviews have been critical. Robert Harling , who knew Gill, wrote in his 1976 anthology examining Gill's lettering that the density of the basic weight made it unsuitable for extended passages of text, printing a passage in it as a demonstration. The regular weight has been used to print body text for some trade printing uses such as guides to countryside walks published by

2835-478: A wave of German sans-serif families in a new " geometric " style, which included Erbar , Futura and Kabel , all being launched to considerable attention in Germany during the late 1920s. Gill Sans was released in 1928 by Monotype, initially as a set of titling capitals that was quickly followed by a lower-case. Gill's aim was to blend the influences of Johnston, classic serif typefaces and Roman inscriptions to create

2940-410: A wide range of styles such as condensed and shadowed weights. Several shadowed designs were released, including a capitals-only regular shadowed design and a light-shadowed version with deep relief shadows. In the metal type era, a 'cameo ruled' design that placed white letters in boxes or against a stippled black background was available. The shadowed weights were intended to be used together with

3045-418: Is bundled with Windows 10 in the user-downloadable "Pan-European Supplemental Fonts" package. Peter Wiegel digitized a modified variant of Gill Sans Bold Condensed that used on road signs in former East Germany until 1990 named TGL 12096-1 typeface. First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become

3150-667: Is called an oblique style. This is clearest in the "a", which becomes a "single storey" design similar to handwriting, and the lower-case "p", which has a calligraphic tail on the left reminiscent of italics such as those cut by William Caslon in the eighteenth century. The italic "e" is more restrained, with a straight line on the underside of the bowl where serif fonts normally add a curve. Like most serif fonts, several weights and releases of Gill Sans use ligatures to allow its expansive letter "f" to join up with or avoid colliding with following letters. The basic letter shapes of Gill Sans do not look consistent across styles (or even in

3255-555: Is different from a true italic , in which the letterforms become modified to resemble handwriting more. In the original design, Frutiger chose obliques with the extremely aggressive slant of sixteen degrees, which was reduced to twelve in some later releases. Linotype Univers (below) returns to the original angle. Frutiger's original ampersand was a true 'et' ligature, similar to that in Trebuchet among others. Frutiger later provided an alternative for non French-speaking countries in which

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3360-411: Is similar in design to other European grotesque fonts, of which Akzidenz-Grotesk, Folio, and Helvetica are among the most common. Differences include: Frutiger himself has commented: "Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket." Walter Tracy described it as better proportioned for text than Helvetica: "more original and subtle in its modelling than Helvetica and, because its character spacing

3465-482: The Aladdin Free Public License . In 1997 Frutiger reworked the whole Univers family in cooperation with Linotype , thus creating the Linotype Univers, which consists of 63 fonts. By reworking the Univers more "extreme" weights as Ultra Light or Extended Heavy were added as well as some monospaced typefaces. The numbering system was extended to three digits to reflect the larger number of variations in

3570-615: The Swiss Style of graphic design . Univers was released after a long period in which geometric typefaces such as Futura had been popular. Frutiger disliked purely geometric designs, finding them too rigid, following a common school of thought among Swiss designers of the period. While studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) in Zürich, he had begun to sketch a revived grotesque family based on 19th-century grotesques, at

3675-466: The roman or regular style are "double-storey" designs, rather than the "single-storey" forms used in handwriting and blackletter often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans-serifs. The upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on Trajan's Column in Rome, with considerable variation in width. These had become a standard for inscriptional lettering in Britain at

3780-416: The "t" with its curve to bottom right and slanting cut at top left, unlike Futura's which is simply formed from two straight lines. The lower-case "a" also narrows strikingly towards the top of its loop, a common feature of serif designs but rarer in sans-serifs. Following the traditional serif model the italic has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what

3885-759: The 'b', 'd', 'p', and 'q' of Gill Sans". The titling capitals of Gill Sans were first unveiled at a printing conference in 1928; it was also shown in a specimen issued in the Fleuron magazine edited by Morison. While initial response was partly appreciative, it was still considered dubious by some ultra-conservative printers who saw all sans-serif type as modern and unsound; one called it "typographical Bolshevism ". Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this period: Johnston's pupil Graily Hewitt privately commented of them that: In Johnston I have lost confidence. Despite all he did for us ... he has undone too much by forsaking his standard of

3990-413: The 1960s and 1970s because many corporations adopted it for usage. It was also adopted by the 1972 Summer Olympics organizers for its image and emblem also in 1976 Summer Olympics . General Electric used the font from 1986 to 2004 before switching to GE Inspira . Apple Inc. previously used this typeface as well as its condensed oblique variant for the keycaps on many of its keyboards. Munich Re used

4095-470: The 1980s by word processors and general-purpose computers. The release was somewhat compromised due having to be made to fit a 9-unit escapement system. Several pirate versions of Univers have been released taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection of typeface designs. One unusual modified version was "Univers Flair", a 1970s phototype clone from Phil Martin's "Alphabet Innovations", adding ostentatious swashes . Frutiger, who found it amusing, placed

4200-453: The 2005 Pro edition, and the 2015 Nova release which adds many alternative characters and is in part included with Windows 10 . In general characteristics for common weights the designs are similar, but there are some changes: for example, in the book weight the 2005 release used circular ij dots but the 2015 release uses square designs, and the 2015 release simplifies some ligatures. Digital Gill Sans also gained character sets not present in

4305-551: The Berthold Exklusiv Collection. Günter Gerhard Lange, Berthold Exklusiv Collection type director during H. Berthold AG era, worked for Berthold Types Limited as an exclusive artistic consultant until his death in 2008. Following Harvey Hunt's death, Monotype announced the acquisition of Berthold Types's inventory of typefaces (but not legal entity) in August 2022. During Harvey Hunt's tenure at Berthold Types Limited,

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4410-417: The L.N.E.R. used the simple version. ) Some early versions of Gill Sans also had features later abandoned, such as an unusual "7" matching the curve of the "9", a "5" pushing forwards, and a lower-case letter-height "0". Gill was involved in the design of these alternatives, and Monotype's archive preserves notes that he rethought the geometric alternatives. With the increasing popularity of Futura Gill Sans

4515-601: The LNER. William Addison Dwiggins described it and Futura as "fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case" while proposing to create a more individualistic competitor, Metro , for Linotype around 1929. Modern writers, including Stephen Coles and Ben Archer, have criticised it for failing to improve on Johnston and for unevenness of colour, especially in the bolder weights (discussed below). More generally, modern font designer Jonathan Hoefler has criticised Johnston and Gill's designs for rigidity, calling their work "products more of

4620-671: The Railway Executive (part of the British Transport Commission ) for signs in its manual for the use of signpainters painting large signs by hand. Other users included Penguin Books ' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935 and British official mapping agency Ordnance Survey . It was also used by London Transport for documents which could not be practically set in Johnston. Paul Shaw, a historian of printing, has described it as

4725-454: The Roman alphabet, giving the world, without safeguard or explanation, his block letters which disfigure our modern life. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and commercialism. Nonetheless, Gill Sans rapidly became popular after its release. Gill Sans' technical production followed Monotype's standard method of the period. The characters were drawn mirrored on paper in large plan diagrams by

4830-560: The United States in this period, however, was a custom wordmark and logo made by Gill for Poetry magazine in 1930 based on Gill Sans. Its editor Harriet Monroe had seen Gill's work in London. The BBC adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its logo . Explaining the change, designer Martin Lambie-Nairn said that "by choosing

4935-537: The Windows PostScript version of the font; however, in Univers 85 Extra Black Oblique, there is no font named Univers 86 in any format. Nevertheless, oblique Univers fonts always have even-numbered 2nd value. Inconsistent usage aside, the syntax of 2nd value is also inconsistent with 1st value. Bigger 1st value implies the glyph of a given character uses more horizontal space, but it has opposite meaning in 2nd value. In Linotype Univers and Univers Next font family,

5040-507: The ampersand to Frutiger's preferred true et ligature. Linotype Univers Typewriter is a sub-family of fixed-width fonts under the Linotype Univers family. Four fonts have been produced in Regular and Bold weights, with obliques on each weight. Characters such as 1, I, J, M, W, i, j, l, dotless j are drawn differently. In 2010, Linotype extended the Linotype Univers family with true small caps and renamed as "Univers Next". All later extensions of

5145-404: The baseline. The "O" is an almost perfect circle and the capital "M" is based on the proportions of a square with the middle strokes meeting at the centre; this was not inspired by Roman carving but is very similar to Johnston. The 'E' and 'F' are also relatively narrow. The influence of traditional serif letters is also clear in the "two-storey" lower-case "a" and "g", unlike that of Futura, and

5250-649: The basis for its standard lettering when the railway companies were nationalised in 1948. Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist deliberately-simple covers of Penguin Books and was sold up to very large sizes, which were often used in British posters and notices of the period. Gill Sans was one of the dominant typefaces in British printing in the years after its release and remains extremely popular. It has been described as "the British Helvetica " because of its lasting popularity in British design. Gill Sans has influenced many other typefaces and helped to define

5355-523: The chilliness of Univers...it does have some elusive quality that gives it a friendlier feel". Dutch font designer Martin Majoor , while praising Univers for its "almost scientific" range of weights, criticised it for its lack of originality: "basing a sans serif on another is rather cheap." Frutiger's later landmark sans-serif designs, Avenir and Frutiger , would take very different, more humanist and geometric approaches. Univers enjoyed great popularity in

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5460-530: The company was accused of sending (frivolous) legal letters usually related to alleged trademark violations. This led to discussions of issues of Berthold not paying the original designers, such as Albert Boton. As a typefounder, Berthold had no background in producing cold type machinery until the introduction of the Diatype in 1958. The Diatype was a relatively small desktop-sized headline-setting device (i.e. not intended for continuous justified text ), based on

5565-428: The custom but very similar Rail Alphabet for signage, and abandoned the classical, all caps signage style with which Gill Sans is often associated. Kinneir and Calvert's road signage redesign used a similar approach. Linotype and its designer Hermann Zapf , who had begun development on a planned Gill Sans competitor in 1955, first considered redrawing some letters to make it more like these faces before abandoning

5670-542: The design as something of a joke, proposed naming it "Double Elefans". Harling reviewed it as "dismal" and sarcastically commented that "typographical historians of 2000AD (which isn't, after all, so very far away) will find this odd outburst in Mr Gill's career, and will spend much time in attempting to track down this sad psychological state of his during 1936." Forty years later he described it as "the most horrendous and blackguardly of these display exploitations". The design

5775-555: The design of the Underground system, one of the first and most lasting uses of a standard lettering style as corporate branding (Gill had designed a set of serif letters for WH Smith ), writing that it "conferred upon [the lettering] a sanction, civic and commercial, as had not been accorded to an alphabet since the time of Charlemagne". Morison and Gill had met with some resistance within Monotype while developing Perpetua and while Morison

5880-410: The design process were the "a" (several versions and sizes in the hot metal era had a straight tail like Johnston's or a mildly curving tail) and the "b", "d", "p" and "q", where some versions (and sizes, since the same weight would not be identical at every size) had stroke ends visible and others did not. Rhatigan has commented that Monotype's archives contain "enough [material] for a book just about

5985-419: The design project (now named "Magnus") around 1962–3. An additional development which reduced Gill Sans' dominance was the arrival of phototypesetting, which allowed typefaces to be printed from photographs on film and (especially in display use – hot metal continued for some body text setting for longer) massively increased the range of typefaces that could cheaply be used. Dry transfers like Letraset had

6090-422: The design was "as much as possible mathematically measurable ... as little reliance as possible should be placed on the sensibility of the draughtsmen and others concerned in its machine facture". Gill Sans rapidly became very popular. Its success was aided by Monotype's sophisticated marketing, led by Gill's supporter Beatrice Warde , and due to its practicality and availability for machine composition in

6195-609: The development of Gill Sans survives in Monotype's archives and in Gill's papers. While the capitals (which were prepared first) resemble Johnston quite closely, the archives document Gill (and the drawing office team at Monotype's works in Salfords Surrey , who developed a final precise design and spacing) grappling with the challenge of creating a viable humanist sans-serif lower-case as well as an italic, which Johnston's design did not have. Gill's first draft proposed many slanting cuts on

6300-515: The digital type era. H. Berthold was founded in Berlin in 1858 by Hermann Berthold , initially to make machined brass printer's rule. It then moved into casting metal type particularly after 1893. The company played a key role in the introduction of major new typefaces and was a successful player in the development of typesetting machines. The production premises were on Wilhelmstrasse No. 1 until 1868, and then on Mehringdamm 43. In 1979

6405-553: The end of the metal type period Gill Sans had been released in the following styles (not all sold at the same time): Titling series were capitals-only. Monotype offered Gill Sans on film in the phototypesetting period. The fonts released in 1961 included Light 362, Series 262, Bold 275, Extra Bold 321, Condensed 343, all of which were released in film matrix sets "A" (6–7 points) and "B" (8–22, 24 points). Monotype created an infant version of Gill Sans using single-storey "a" and "g", and other more distinguishable characters such as

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6510-431: The ends of ascenders and descenders, looking less like Johnston than the released version did, and quite long descenders. Early art for the italic also looked very different, with less of a slope, again very long descenders and swash capitals . The final version did not use the calligraphic italic "g" Gill preferred in his serif designs Perpetua and Joanna (and considered in the draft italic art), instead using

6615-533: The experienced drawing office team, led and trained by Pierpont and Fritz Steltzer, both of whom Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry. The drawing staff who executed the design was disproportionately female; they worked out many aspects of the final drawings including adaptations of the letters to different sizes and the spacing. The diagrams were then used as a plan for machining metal punches by pantograph to stamp matrices , which would be loaded into

6720-453: The factory moved to another location between Teltow Canal and Wiesenweg in Lichterfelde . The H. Berthold foundry's most celebrated family of typefaces is arguably Akzidenz-Grotesk (released 1898), an early sans-serif which prefigured by half a century the release of enormously popular neo-grotesque faces such as Helvetica . In 1950, type designer Günter Gerhard Lange embarked upon

6825-500: The family. In addition to extra font width and weight combinations, the fonts are digitally interpolated, so that character widths scale uniformly with changing font weights. For fonts within a specific font weight, caps height, x-height, ascender and descender heights are the same. For oblique fonts, the slope is increased from 12° to the 16° of Frutiger's original drawings, and the character widths were adjusted optically. In addition, characters such as &, ®, euro sign, are redesigned,

6930-917: The font family were marketed under the Univers Next title. The font family includes all fonts previously released under the Linotype Univers title. In April 2010, Linotype announced the release of Cyrillic versions of the original Univers family, in TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType Pro font formats. Released fonts include Univers 55 Roman Oblique; Univers Pro Cyrillic 45 (roman, oblique), 55 (roman, oblique), 65 (roman, oblique), 75 (roman, oblique), 85 (roman, oblique), 47 (roman, oblique), 57 (roman, oblique), 67 (roman, oblique), 39 (roman), 49 (roman), 59 (roman). This version supports Greek and Cyrillic characters. The font family includes 12 fonts (330, 331, 430, 431, 530, 531, 630, 631, 730, 731, 830, 831) in 6 weights and 1 width, with complementary obliques. The Cyrillic version

7035-693: The form might be less familiar. The Deberny & Peignot library was acquired in 1972 by Haas Type Foundry . It was transferred into the D. Stempel AG and Linotype collection in 1985 and 1989 respectively upon the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei's acquisition and closure; it is now owned by Monotype following its purchase of Linotype in 2007. An independent version of Univers was licensed by the Berthold Type Foundry for its phototypesetting system with adaptations by Günter Gerhard Lange ; Frutiger wrote in his autobiography that he had some affection for it. Univers

7140-450: The high-quality ad setting trade in Europe. Its major advantage was fine control of typography thanks to continuously variable optics, allowing fractions of point sizes to be specified. Operator feedback was by means of a green-screen CRT display showing code mnemonics only, it being left to the operator to visualise final output. Keyboard operation was innovative, utilizing many keys with

7245-627: The hooked 1 as default, while the regular weight is renamed 'Medium'. Monotype celebrated the release with a London exhibition on Gill's work, as they had in 1958 to mark the general release of Gill's serif design Joanna. One addition was italic swash caps, which had been considered by Gill but never released. The family includes 43 fonts, including 33 text fonts in 9 weights and 3 widths, 6 inline fonts in 5 weights and 2 widths (1 in condensed), 2 shadowed fonts in 2 weights and 1 width, 1 shadowed outline font, 1 deco font. Characters set support includes W1G. The basic set of Regular, Light and Bold weights

7350-479: The horizontals slightly narrower than verticals so that they do not appear unbalanced, a standard technique in font design which Johnston had not used. The "R" with its widely splayed leg is Gill's preferred design, unlike that of Johnston; historian James Mosley has suggested that this may be inspired by an Italian Renaissance carving in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Particular areas of thought during

7455-404: The hot metal era, with most preferring gothic designs like Franklin Gothic and geometric designs like Futura and Monotype's own Twentieth Century . Gill Sans therefore particularly achieved worldwide popularity after the close of the metal type era and in the phototypesetting and digital era, when it became a system font on Macintosh computers and Microsoft Office . One use of Gill's work in

7560-507: The initial success of Gill Sans, Monotype rapidly produced a wide variety of other variants. In addition, Monotype sold moulds ( matrices ) for Gill Sans in very large sizes for their "Supercaster" type-casting equipment. Popular with advertisers, this allowed end-users to cast their own type at a very competitive price. This made it a popular choice for posters. Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke has described it as "the essence of clarity for public notices". Versions of Gill Sans were created in

7665-470: The last because each advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbours. Monotype developed a set of alternative characters for Gill Sans to cater for differing tastes and national printing styles of different countries. These include Futura-inspired designs of "N", "M", "R", "a", "g", "t" and others, a four-terminal "W" in the French renaissance style, a tighter "R", a "Q" in the nineteenth-century style with

7770-475: The later spacing: "the metal version ... was spaced, I suspect, as if it were a serif face". As of 2019, Monotype's current digitisation of Gill Sans is Gill Sans Nova, by George Ryan. Gill Sans Nova adds many additional variants, including some of the previously undigitised inline versions, stylistic alternates and an ultra-light weight which had been drawn for Grazia . The fonts differ from Gill Sans MT (MT stands for Monotype) in their adoption of

7875-510: The letters "J" and "Q" be allowed to elegantly descend below the baseline , something not normal for titling typefaces which were often made to fill up the entire area of the metal type. In the early days of its existence it was not always consistently simply called "Gill Sans", with other names such as "Gill Sans-serif", "Monotype Sans-Serif" (the latter two both used by Gill in some of his publications) or its order numbers (such as Series No. 231) sometimes used. A large amount of material about

7980-490: The machine than the hand, chilly and austere designs shaped by unbending rules, whose occasional moments of whimsy were so out of place as to feel volatile and disquieting". Gill broached the topic of the similarity with Johnston in a variety of ways in his work and writings, writing to Johnston in 1933 to apologise for the typeface bearing his name and describing Johnston's work as being important and seminal. However, in his Essay on Typography , he proposed that his version

8085-570: The metal type era all the sizes of the same style), especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the Ultra Bold style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such. Digital-period Monotype designer Dan Rhatigan, author of an article on Gill Sans's development after Gill's death, has commented: "Gill Sans grew organically ... [it] takes a very 'asystematic' approach to type. Very characteristic of when it

8190-634: The metal type, including text figures and small capitals . Like all metal type revivals, reviving Gill Sans in digital form raises several decisions of interpretation, such as the issue of how to compensate for the ink spread that would have been seen in print at small sizes more than larger. As a result, printed Gill Sans and its digital facsimile may not always match. The digital release of Gill Sans, like many Monotype digitisations, has been criticised, in particular for excessively tight letter-spacing and lack of optical sizes : with only one design released that has to be used at any text size, it cannot replicate

8295-442: The nineteenth-century tendency to make sans-serif typefaces attention-grabbingly bold was self-defeating, since the result was compromised legibility. In the closing paragraph he ruefully noted his contribution to the genre: There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters – each one thicker and fatter than

8400-436: The regular, printing in different colours, to achieve a simple multicolour effect. Some of the decorative versions may predominantly have been designed by the Monotype office, with Gill examining, critiquing and approving the designs sent to him by post. The long series of extensions, redrawings and conversions into new formats of one of Monotype's most important assets (extending long beyond Gill's death) has left Gill Sans with

8505-638: The same style such as Helvetica and Univers. Mosley has commented that in 1960 "orders unexpectedly revived" for the old Monotype Grotesque design: "[it] represents, even more evocatively than Univers, the fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties." He added in 2007 "its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the ... prettiness of Gill Sans". As an example of this trend, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert 's corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Helvetica and Univers for printed matter and

8610-638: The slanting cut at top left of the regular "t" is replaced with two separate strokes. From the bold weight upwards Gill Sans has an extremely eccentric design of "i" and "j" with the dots smaller than their parent letter's stroke. Morison commissioned Gill to develop Gill Sans after they had begun to work together (often by post since Gill lived in Wales) on Gill's serif design Perpetua from 1925 onwards; they had known each other since about 1913. Morison visited Cleverdon's bookshop while in Bristol in 1927 where he saw and

8715-479: The standard typeface by the LNER railway company, soon appearing on every facet of the company's identity, from metal locomotive nameplates and hand-painted station signage to printed restaurant car menus, timetables and advertising posters. The LNER promoted their rebranding by offering Gill (who was fascinated with railway engines) a footplate ride on the Flying Scotsman express service; he also painted for it

8820-434: The subtlety of design and spacing of the metal type, for which every size was drawn differently. In the hot metal era different font sizes varied as is normal for metal type, with wider spacing and other detail changes at smaller text sizes; other major sans-serif families such as Futura and Akzidenz-Grotesk are similar. In the phototype period Monotype continued to offer two or three sizes of master, but all of this subtlety

8925-399: The supported languages. The font family consists of 3 fonts (330, 430, 630) in 3 weights and 1 width, without obliques. OpenType features include fraction, localized forms, proportional figures, contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, initial forms, terminal forms, glyph composition/decomposition, isolated forms, medial forms, required ligatures. Gill Sans Gill Sans is

9030-539: The system correctly, however, things have actually become more confusing. To further complicate matters, the numbering system is not consistently applied to the Univers font family. In older publications, all oblique fonts have even-numbered 2nd values; but in digital versions, both odd and even 2nd values have been used on oblique fonts, but not in all font formats or weights. For example, Univers 55 Roman Oblique has both Windows menu names and PostScript full names as Univers LT 55 Oblique and Univers 56 Oblique , but only for

9135-430: The time : Gill's teacher Edward Johnston had written that, "The Roman capitals have held the supreme place among letters for readableness and beauty. They are the best forms for the grandest and most important inscriptions." While Gill Sans is not based on purely geometric principles to the extent of the geometric sans-serifs that had preceded it, some aspects of Gill Sans do have a geometric feel. The J descends below

9240-431: The time considered antiquated outside Switzerland. He described Univers in 1998 as having a 'visual sensitivity between thick and thin' strokes, avoiding perfect geometry. Different weights and variations within the type family are designated by the use of numbers rather than names, a system since adopted by Frutiger for other type designs. Frutiger envisioned a large family with multiple widths and weights that maintained

9345-460: The vehicles themselves in the instrument panel graphics and their MMI dashboard displays. Both the current and the former eBay logo are set in Univers. Adrian Frutiger designed his unique classification system to eliminate naming and specifying confusion. It was first used with Univers, and was adopted for use in the Frutiger , Avenir , and Neue Helvetica typeface families. The number used in

9450-428: The whole business of sans-serif from its nineteenth-century corruption" of extreme boldness. Johnston apparently had not tried to turn the alphabet (as it was then called) that he had designed into a commercial typeface project. He had tried to get involved in type design before starting work on Johnston Sans, but without success since the industry at the time mostly created designs in-house. Morison similarly respected

9555-460: The width of this 'word' at a specific font size would indicate if the character width and spacing was set correctly. Berthold Diatronic systems were based on a glass grid master of each font weight , composed on a code-driven system. A marching-character display provided editing capabilities only to the line currently being composed. The next incarnation of the Diatronic system was widely adopted in

9660-548: Was "perhaps an improvement" and more "fool-proof" than Johnston's. Johnston and Gill had drifted apart by the beginning of the 1920s, something Gill's groundbreaking biographer Fiona MacCarthy describes as partly due to the anti-Catholicism of Johnston's wife Greta. Frank Pick , the Underground Electric Railways Company managing director who commissioned Johnston's typeface, privately thought Gill Sans "a rather close copy" of Johnston's work. Following

9765-471: Was an enthusiastic backer of the project, Monotype's engineering manager and type designer Frank Hinman Pierpont was deeply unconvinced, commenting that he could "see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable". (Pierpont was the creator of Monotype's previous mainstay sans-serif, a loose family now called Monotype Grotesque . It is a much less sculptured design inspired by German sans-serifs. ) Morison also intervened to insist that

9870-463: Was an ultra-premium electric 'golfball' typewriter system, intended to be used for producing high-quality office documents or copy to be photographically enlarged for small-scale printing projects. Unlike most typewriters, the Composer produced proportional type, rather than monospaced letters. Ultimately the system proved a transitional product, as it was displaced by cheaper phototypesetting, and then in

9975-567: Was begun in 1932; some of the first drawings may have been prepared by Gill's son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier. It made a return to popularity in the graphic design of the 1970s and 80s, when Letraset added a condensed weight. The boldest weights of Gill Sans, including Kayo, have been particularly criticised for design issues such as the eccentric design of the dots on the "i" and "j", and for their extreme boldness. (Gill Sans' standard weight is, as already noted, already quite bold by modern standards. ) Gill argued in his Essay on Typography that

10080-402: Was designed and of when it was used." (At this time the idea that sans-serif typefaces should form a consistent family, with glyph shapes as consistent as possible between all weights and sizes, had not fully developed: it was quite normal for families to vary as seemed appropriate for their weight until developments such as the groundbreaking release of Univers in 1957. ) In the light weights,

10185-430: Was designed to be more legible on mobile devices , and did not require licensing for continued use. The font was adopted by the BBC's corporate logo in 2021. Berthold Type Foundry H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful type foundries in the world for most of the modern typographic era, making the transition from foundry type to cold type successfully and only coming to dissolution in

10290-640: Was impressed by Gill's fascia and alphabet. Gill wrote that "it was as a consequence of seeing these letters" that Morison commissioned him to develop a sans-serif family. In the period during and after his closest collaboration with Johnston, Gill had intermittently worked on sans-serif letter designs, including an almost sans-serif capital design in an alphabet for sign-painters in the 1910s and some capital letter signs around his home in Capel-y-ffin , Wales. Gill had greatly admired Johnston's work on their Underground project, which he later wrote had "redeemed

10395-470: Was lost on transfer to digital. To replicate this, it is necessary to make manual adjustment to spacing to compensate for size changes, such as expanding the spacing and increasing the weight used at smaller sizes. Former ATypI president John Berry commented of Gill Sans' modernised spacing that "both the regular weight and especially the light weight look much better when they're tracked loose". In contrast, Walter Tracy wrote in 1986 that he preferred

10500-449: Was not alone in being adapted: both Erbar and Dwiggins' Metro would undergo what historian Paul Shaw has called a "Futura-ectomy" to conform to taste. After Gill's death, Monotype created versions for the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Monotype also added additional features not found in the metal type, notably text figures and small capitals. According to Rhatigan and other sources, by

10605-408: Was originally conceived to take advantage of the cost-saving properties of phototypesetting (Deberny & Peignot, hoping to leapfrog their competitors by taking full advantage of the new technology, advertised their Lumitype glass master discs as each replacing three tons of brass matrices ), Deberny & Peignot arranged licensing deals with type foundries such as Monotype for wider release. Univers

10710-414: Was properly done, a better performer in text composition." Mosley has described its even design as "rather bland" and noted that Monotype's eccentric, chaotically organised Grotesque family remained popular with more "iconoclastic" printers in the 1960s. Stephen Coles describes Univers as "in some ways, even more spare [than Helvetica] (no beards or tails)" and Simon Loxley comments that Helvetica "escapes

10815-472: Was quite successful in metal type, with several weights among Monotype's best-selling of all time despite being released at the very end of the metal type era, although Frutiger felt that the Monotype version, which some later versions copied, was limited by the antiquated Monotype technical system. Frutiger (with Howard "Bud" Kettler) adapted Univers for the IBM Selectric Composer in the 1960s. This

10920-585: Was released as Univers Next Cyrillic in OpenType Pro format. Univers Next Arabic is a companion to the Latin typeface Univers Next designed by Nadine Chahine with the consulting of Adrian Frutiger. It is a modern Kufi design with large open counters and low contrast, mainly designed to work in titles and short runs of text. The font includes the basic Latin part of Univers Next and support for Persian, Urdu and Arabic. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for

11025-481: Was undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The death of metal type ... seemed at last to be happening. While extremely popular in Britain, and to a lesser extent in European printing, Gill Sans did not achieve popularity with American printers in

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