19 Facts About Univers

The original marketing for Univers deliberately referenced the periodic table to emphasise its scope.

Univers was one of the first typeface families to fulfil the idea that a typeface should form a family of consistent, related designs.

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.

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.

Univers is one of a group of neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces, all released in 1957, that includes Folio and Neue Haas Grotesk.

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Univers was released after a long period in which geometric typefaces such as Futura had been popular.

Univers described Univers in 1998 as having a 'visual sensitivity between thick and thin' strokes, avoiding perfect geometry.

An independent version of Univers was licensed by the Berthold Type Foundry for its phototypesetting system with adaptations by Gunter Gerhard Lange; Frutiger wrote in his autobiography that he had some affection for it.

Univers is similar in design to other European grotesque fonts, of which Akzidenz-Grotesk, Folio, and Helvetica are among the most common.

Univers enjoyed great popularity in the 1960s and 1970s because many corporations adopted it for usage.

Almost all Canada Vignettes titles were shown in Univers; as were the credits for the original One Day at a Time, the Danger Man title sequences, and the closing credits for Speed Buggy, The Brady Bunch and The Love Boat.

Univers is used as an official logo in lowercase for UNICEF since 2003.

Univers was used for George W Bush's campaign logos in both 2000 and 2004.

Univers is currently used for the user interface on Sony's imaging products since 2007.

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.

Univers 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.

Several pirate versions of Univers have been released taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection of typeface designs.

Linotype Univers Typewriter is a sub-family of fixed-width fonts under the Linotype Univers family.