Adrian Frutiger – Univers

Adrian Frutiger’s Univers (1957) is the first type family in which the individual variations are systematically and harmoniously coordinated. Frutiger’s twenty-one variations were made possible by phototypesetting, where a glass plate replaces tons of lead material. Twenty variations appear simultaneously on the glass plate (the twenty-first is too fine to be displayed). It would be another ten years, however, before twenty of the twenty-one styles in this extended type family were produced in lead.