![]() ![]() Neue Helvetica World fonts enable the setting of pan-European languages, in addition to Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Thai and Vietnamese. The typographic love-child became the lost child. Unica became entangled in a dispute over ownership and disappeared from the market. Desktop publishing software rendered phototypesetting obsolete. Released in 1980, Unica hit the sweet spot. “Unica was designed to be different,” said André Gürtler “sharper than Helvetica, warmer than Univers, cleaner than Akzidenz.” Working from prints of Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk, the trio identified, compared and evaluated the finest of details, creating a new-generation sans-serif that eliminated the imperfections of its predecessors. They went about the task with forensic rigour. It’s that wide array of uses that partly inspired Monotype, the oldest type company in the world and the one that currently holds the rights to Helvetica, to update the storied font for the 21st. The name they gave it would also be a hybrid of the two. Team ’77 set out to design a font based on Helvetica but drawing on other sans-serif typefaces, principally Univers. To develop their new product, they turned to Swiss type design trio, Team ’77 (André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind). The revered Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, saw the chance to develop a new sans-serif face that was optimized for the new technology and filled the gap in the market. Electronic, on-screen phototypesetting was gaining popularity, but most sans-serif typefaces on the market had been designed earlier, in the era of metal type. Designed by Team ’77 and released to great acclaim in 1980, Unica went missing under a heap of legal disputes and has never been available as a full, digital typeface. Unica® was an attempt to create the ultimate sans-serif – a hybrid of Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk. To meet the needs of todays creatives and designers, the Monotype Studio began. ![]() Neue Haas Unica™ is Monotype’s revival of a typeface that has attained almost mythical status in the type community. But before the Helvetica Now font, another font came out called the Neue.
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