All the fonts matched each other stylistically. Twenty-one styles were part of Univers’s initial release, and each was designed according to the same letterform scheme. The story of the young Adrian Frutiger’s development of Univers at Deberny et Peignot has often been told: from the beginning, he conceived of Univers as a family of typefaces, with multiple weights and widths. No other designs better illustrate the changes in the ways typefaces were developed between the 1890s and the 1950s, or even between the 1890s and today.
In addition to the above-mentioned Neue Haas-Grotesk/Helvetica, that wave of new designs included Folio, ¹¹ Univers, ¹² and Record Gothic ¹³ as well as many others.Īkzidenz-Grotesk and Helvetica are often compared with each other, but Univers represents a far more interesting counterpoint for Akzidenz-Grotesk.
#Berthold akzidenz grotesk be font series#
Although Akzidenz-Grotesk seems to have inspired similar designs beforehand, such as Venus ⁷ and Ideal-Grotesk ⁸ - themselves the basis for Monotype Grotesque Series 215 and 216 ⁹ - and perhaps even Titania and Urania, ¹⁰ something is fascinating about the number of neo-grotesques produced in the 1950s and ’60s. in Stuttgart and Berthold in Berlin published its very first weight together in 1898, ⁶ but it was only in the 1950s that the typeface’s use began to take off. As a family of typefaces, Akzidenz-Grotesk was a work-in-progress. While Helvetica was not simply a reworking of Akzidenz-Grotesk, ⁵ its initial development as Neue Haas-Grotesk in Switzerland reflected, in part, the popularity that Akzidenz-Grotesk had begun to enjoy in Western European graphic design during the immediate postwar years. No earlier typeface had ever experienced that kind of hold on the market, at least not in Germany. Helvetica’s popularity eventually became so widespread that - as Gary Hustwit presented in his 2007 documentary film Helvetica - its use represented a cultural milestone. ³ Typographically, it took a long time to get to something like the ubiquity that Helvetica ⁴ enjoyed among Western European and North American graphic designers in the 1960s. Those designers were just as likely to specify new geometric-style sans serifs like Futura ² as they were older typefaces, like Schelter & Giesecke’s late-nineteenth-century Breite magere Grotesk. Still outré for whole books, German typographers were by then finally beginning to regularly consider sans serifs for long texts, or publications intended for immersive reading. When Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie appeared 28 years later, it was also composed entirely with sans serifs. This was the Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: eine Betrachtung des Theaters als höchsten Kultursymbols, ¹ written and designed by Peter Behrens. The first book composed entirely in upper- and lowercase sans serif types was only published in 1900.