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128-480: 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

256-541: 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

384-545: 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

512-512: 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

640-486: A competitor to the German Futura . Monotype entered a decline from the 1960s onwards. This was caused by the reduction in use of hot metal typesetting and replacement with phototypesetting and lithography in mass-market printing. This offered considerable efficiencies, such as no need to print books from solid metal type, quicker setting of type and a reduced number of operators needed. It also promised

768-447: 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

896-473: 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

1024-552: 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

1152-414: A focus on the company's traditional core competencies of typography and professional printing. Monotype was the first company to produce a digital version of the handwritten Persian script, Persian Nasta'liq . A Chinese "keyboard" was developed to typeset Chinese characters; it consisted of a book with a stylus. As the pages were turned, the page number was detected electrically and this was combined with

1280-403: 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

1408-413: 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

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1536-459: 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

1664-510: 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

1792-675: 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. Frutiger in 1961, explaining why his design had rejected the geometric sans-serif design trend popular from the 1920s to the 1950s. 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

1920-408: 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

2048-598: 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

2176-465: A more diverse and exciting range of fonts than that possible with hot metal, where it is necessary to own life-size matrices for every size of every font to be used. Monotype made the transition to cold type and began to market its own "Monophoto" phototypesetting systems, but these suffered from problems. Its first devices were heavily based on hot metal machinery, with glass pictures of characters which would be reproduced on photographic paper replacing

2304-529: A patented mechanical method of punching out metal types from cold strips of metal which were set (hence typesetting ) into a matrix for the printing press . In 1896, Lanston patented the first hot metal typesetting machine and Monotype issued Modern Condensed, its first typeface . The licenses for the Lanston type library have been acquired by P22 , a digital type foundry based in Buffalo , New York. In

2432-575: 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),

2560-759: A search for funding, the company set up a branch in London around 1897 under the name Lanston Monotype Corporation Ltd, generally known as the Monotype Corporation. In 1899, a new factory was built in Salfords near Redhill in Surrey where it has been located for over a century. The company was of sufficient size to justify the construction of its own Salfords railway station . The Monotype machine worked by casting letters from "hot metal" (molten metal) as pieces of type. Thus spelling mistakes could be corrected by adding or removing individual letters. This

2688-623: 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

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2816-493: 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

2944-528: 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

3072-403: 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

3200-590: 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,

3328-538: 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

3456-464: 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

3584-401: 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

3712-464: 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

3840-483: 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

3968-410: 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

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4096-418: 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

4224-667: 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

4352-560: 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

4480-411: 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

4608-493: 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

4736-633: 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

4864-781: The Type Museum collection in London; other materials are held at St Bride Library . The history and decline of the hot metal American Lanston Monotype Corporation is described in full detail by Richard L. Hopkins , in Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype. The origin of digital Typesetting . In 2004, P22 type foundry bought the "Lanston Type Co." from Gerald Giampa . The history of the English brand can be found in: Judy Slinn, Sebastian Carter, Richard Southall: The History of

4992-470: 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

5120-416: 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

5248-764: 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

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5376-551: The 1920s, the company's British branch was well known for commissioning popular, historically influenced designs that revived some of the best typefaces of the past, with particular attention to the early period of printing from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century. This series of releases was a major part of the typographic renaissance of the period, an expansion of the Arts and Crafts movement interest in printing into

5504-413: 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

5632-470: 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

5760-453: 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

5888-415: The British in artistic reputation. Their designs are now often rather obscure, since (unlike products from the British branch) few have been made widely available through bundling with Microsoft products. The company employed Frederic Goudy on several serif font projects which were well received at the time, and on staff type designer Sol Hess , who created the geometric sans-serif Twentieth Century as

6016-417: 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

6144-605: 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

6272-694: The Monotype Corporation , Vanbrugh Press & Printing historical Society , Woodstock, London, 2014, ISBN   978-0993051005 In 1992, The Monotype Corporation Ltd. appointed Administrative Receivers on 5 March and four days later Monotype Typography Ltd. was established. Cromas Holdings, an investment company based in Switzerland, bought the Monotype Corporation Ltd. and Monotype Inc. (excluding Monotype Typography) and five other direct subsidiary companies in France, Germany, Italy,

6400-469: The Netherlands, and Singapore. Monotype Systems Ltd. was the adopted name for the new organization with Peter Purdy as Chairman, the name Monotype was under license from Monotype Typography Ltd which retained the trademark Monotype. Monotype Systems Ltd. focused on selling pre-press software and hardware, raster image processors and workflow. Cromas Holdings reorganized its publishing interests with

6528-700: 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

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6656-458: 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

6784-579: The UK continued to enjoy prestige through the 1970s with the patronage of major British printers such as the university presses at Oxford and Cambridge; it also enjoyed some success with its Lasercomp laser-based typesetting system from the 1970s onwards, developed by the Cambridge research group. However, new technology and finally publishing software such as Quark XPress and Aldus PageMaker running on general-purpose computers ate away at its competitiveness in

6912-606: The US Monotype Inc became alfaQuest Technologies Limited. Both companies still sell pre-press software and hardware. In 1999, Agfa -Compugraphic acquired the company, which was renamed Agfa Monotype. In late 2004, after six years under the Agfa Corporation, the Monotype assets were acquired by TA Associates , a private equity investment firm based in Boston . The company was incorporated as Monotype Imaging, with

7040-524: 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

7168-545: 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,

7296-512: 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

7424-404: 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

7552-657: 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

7680-527: 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

7808-471: The company acquired Ascender Corporation , a provider of fonts and font technologies used in computers, mobile devices, consumer electronics and software products. In March 2012, the company acquired Bitstream Inc. , a digital font retailer. The deal also gave Monotype ownership of the MyFonts font sale website used by many independent designers and its WhatTheFont recognition service. On 15 July 2014,

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7936-768: The company acquired FontShop , the last large independent digital font retailer. In October 2019 Monotype changed ownership to HGGC, a private equity firm . A few months later, on January 27, 2020, the company added FontSmith, an independent London foundry, to its font catalog. On May 18, 2020, Monotype made another major expansion by purchasing URW Type Foundry from Global Graphics plc. In late 2021 it continued its expansion by acquiring iconic New York company Hoefler & Co. (created by Jonathan Hoefler in 1989), thus increasing its library with well-known fonts such as Gotham , Knockout, Mercury, Sentinel, Chronicle, Decimal, and Archer . In 2023, Monotype acquired Japanese type foundry Fontworks. In 2024, Monotype acquired

8064-499: The company from 1924 to 1942. Despite tensions within the company, particularly between the historically minded faction of Morison and Warde and Pierpont in Salfords, notable typefaces commissioned included Gill Sans , Times New Roman and Perpetua , and the company maintained high standards of development allowing it to produce designs with good spacing, careful adaptation of the same basic design to different sizes and even color on

8192-657: The company has been responsible for many developments in printing technology—in particular the Monotype machine, which was a fully mechanical hot metal typesetter , that produced texts automatically, all single type. Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs , including Times New Roman , Gill Sans , Arial , Bembo and Albertus . Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH , International Typeface Corporation , Bitstream , FontShop , URW , Hoefler & Co. , Fontsmith, Fontworks  [ ja ] and Colophon Foundry,

8320-481: The company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica , ITC Franklin Gothic , Optima , ITC Avant Garde , Palatino , FF DIN and Gotham . It also owns MyFonts , used by many independent font design studios. The company is owned by HGGC , a private equity firm . The Lanston Monotype Machine Company was founded by Tolbert Lanston in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , in 1887. Lanston had

8448-471: The company included future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan , Vice-Chairman, and other businessmen connected to publishing. Monotype's role in design history is not merely due to their supply of printing equipment but due to their commissioning of many of the most important typefaces of the twentieth century. The company's first face, issued in 1896, was a rather generic design, now named Modern , influenced by Bodoni and Scotch Roman designs. However, by

8576-428: 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

8704-547: 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

8832-510: 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

8960-410: 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

9088-419: 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

9216-422: 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

9344-620: 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

9472-405: The early years of the 20th century, with a typewriter style keyboard for entering the type being introduced in 1906. This arrangement addressed the need to vary the space between words so that all lines were the same length. The keyboard operator types the copy, each key punching holes in a roll of paper tape that will control the separate caster. A drum on the keyboard indicates to the operator

9600-553: 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

9728-431: 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

9856-537: 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

9984-500: 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,

10112-928: 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

10240-706: 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

10368-531: The formation of the International Publishing Asset Holding Ltd. effectively controlling Monotype Systems Ltd., QED Technology Ltd., and GB Techniques Ltd. The company acquired Berthold Communications; the UK subsidiary of the German composing equipment supplier. In June 2002, Monotype Systems Limited was re-branded, IPA Systems Limited, as this marked the end of the existing trademark licence with Monotype Corporation. In

10496-627: 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

10624-484: 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

10752-404: 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

10880-507: 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

11008-474: 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

11136-475: 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

11264-584: The letter. Once the matrix is positioned over the mould that forms the body of the type being cast, molten type metal is injected. To promote its image, the company ran a magazine, the Monotype Recorder , over most of the twentieth century, and also ran a compositor (typesetter operator) training school in London. In 1936, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange and became the Monotype Corporation Ltd. Board members of

11392-510: 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

11520-490: 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

11648-462: The market of complete typesetting solutions by the 1990s. Monotype, however, has continued in business, for instance marketing typeface designs to third-party buyers, computing companies such as Microsoft (many fonts on Microsoft computers in particular are Monotype-designed) and companies and organisations such as London Transport and the UK parliament requiring custom digital typefaces. Much of its metal type equipment and archives were donated to

11776-467: The matrices used to cast metal type. While this reduced the need for retraining, the resulting devices often set type slowly compared to legacy-free next-generation devices from providers such as Photon and Compugraphic , and were often more expensive. Its devices were slow to incorporate use of electronics, and while its type library was of high quality, changing tastes and the development of other companies' libraries competed with this. Its type library

11904-582: 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

12032-634: 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

12160-408: The more workaday world of general-purpose printing. Key executives of the company in this period included historian and adviser Stanley Morison , publicity manager Beatrice Warde , engineering expert Frank Hinman Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer (the latter two both recruited from the German printing industry, although Pierpont was American), under managing director William Isaac Burch, who led

12288-442: 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

12416-514: The page, essential qualities for balanced body text. Historian James Mosley , who worked closely with Monotype in the 1950s and onwards, has commented: The English Monotype Corporation of the interwar years looks in retrospect rather like one of the great public bodies of the period, for example the British Broadcasting Corporation or London Transport ... benevolent monopolies ruled by autocrats who revelled in

12544-510: The position of the character selected by the stylus on a large grid. In 2003, the company launched Fontwise, the first software to audit desktops for licensed and unlicensed (not necessarily illegal) fonts. On 2 October 2006, the company acquired Linotype GmbH, a subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen . On 18 September 2006, the company acquired China Type Design Limited, a typeface design and production company based in Hong Kong. CTDL

12672-436: 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

12800-428: The role of patron of the arts on a scale exceeding that of Italian Renaissance princes. Monotype enjoyed, in Britain at least, something approaching a monopoly in book and better-quality magazine typesetting.. .Monotype exploited the glamor of its new typefaces... with brilliant publicity, for which Morison and his devoted young American recruit Beatrice Warde were partly responsible. The American branch lagged behind

12928-638: 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

13056-647: 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

13184-404: The space required for each line. This information is also punched in the paper. Before fitting the tape to the caster it is turned over so that the first holes read on each line set the width of the variable space. The subsequent holes determine the position of a frame, or die case, that holds the set of matrices for the face being used. Each matrix is a rectangle of bronze recessed with the shape of

13312-486: 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

13440-434: 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

13568-399: 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

13696-539: 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

13824-430: 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

13952-431: 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

14080-465: 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

14208-428: 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

14336-563: 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

14464-529: Was also easily pirated, since fonts have only limited copyright protection. The company was eventually split into three divisions: Monotype International, which manufactured spinning mirror switched laser beam phototypesetters; Monotype Limited, which continued the hot metal machines; and Monotype Typography, which designed and sold typefaces. A research and development department was set up in Cambridge to isolate it from day to day production issues. Monotype in

14592-471: 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

14720-468: 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

14848-567: 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

14976-402: 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,

15104-569: 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. Monotype Imaging Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. , founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston , is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices. Based in Woburn, Massachusetts ,

15232-646: 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

15360-470: 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

15488-453: 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

15616-408: 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

15744-554: Was particularly useful for "quality" printing - such as books. In contrast, the Linotype machine —a direct competitor —formed a complete line of type in one bar. Editing these required replacing an entire line (and if the replacement ran onto another line, the rest of the paragraph). But Linotype slugs were easier to handle if moving a complete section of text around a page. This was more useful for "quick" printing - such as newspapers. The typesetting machines were continually improved in

15872-414: 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

16000-482: 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

16128-595: 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

16256-501: Was responsible for developing Microsoft JhengHei , the default traditional Chinese interface font for Windows Vista . The deal also secured an exclusive relationship with Creative Calligraphy Center (CCC), a font production company in Zhuhai , China, with 30 production specialists. On 11 December 2009, the company acquired Planetweb, a developer specialized in applications and development tools for embedded devices. On 8 December 2010,

16384-486: 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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