Here’s a comparison of Helvetica Neue and Unica, both set at 30/30, with InDesign’s optical kerning turned on. Even Myriad Pro, conceived and drawn in the digital age, doesn’t have real small caps. For one thing, Unica has true small caps! - Still a rarity among sans serif typefaces, and missing entirely from almost all versions of Helvetica and Univers. ‘Nuff said.) Unica is designed for both display work and text, and it works on screen and on paper.īut there are other reasons to get excited. (Try OS X Yosemite on a non-Retina display. Univers and Helvetica are classics, but if you’ve worked with them you’ll know they’re not so readable in smaller sizes, and they really, really don’t translate well to your average computer screen. I recommend reading the rest of the article, and the background history of Neue Haas Unica on the Linotype website, because from a typographic point of view this news is on par with hearing that Amelia Earhart’s plane had been discovered, but that’s not the only reason this is good news.
#Neue haas unica adobe movie
Imagine it fading into obscurity and existing for decades as nothing more than a cult film, a historical footnote, an object of fascination among serious movie buffs. IMAGINE IF, DUE to some fluke, The Empire Strikes Back had only been shown in a couple of movie theaters. Some things are just too cool to stay calm about.Īn article that appeared recently on Wired starts like this:
I recommend that you do check that out too.Pardon me for waxing enthusiastic. I am not here to compare or comment on the differences, but it does have an impressive set of glyphs and monospaced subfamily.
It was designed by Christian Mengelt, one of Team ’77 members. The Greek won the Granshan Type Competition’s 1st prize in Greek typeface design in 2015.Įven though this page is about my Neue version, it would be only fair if I mentioned Unica ’77 ( ), the other contemporary Haas Unica revival from Lineto. The updates are all subtle yet quite a few, except for major additions like small caps, Greek, and Cyrillic. I gave everything I got to bring Unica to the new standard and make it worthy of digital Helvetica 2.0. I proposed a collaboration with the Team ’77 members, especially Gürtler, which regrettably did not come to fruition. I immediately made a proposal to revive the forgotten gem that was perhaps not given a fair chance to prove its worth yet.
#Neue haas unica adobe archive
On a visit at the Linotype archive near Frankfurt one day, I stumbled upon a large pack of drawings and negative masters of Unica. Linotype hadn’t touched Unica for a long time, since it had Helvetica and Univers, and did not have much commercial interest in the typeface. The digital version was available from Scangraphic which was taken down after a copyright dispute with Linotype which had acquired Haas. One prominent use case of the time was Octavo magazine that were published between 1985–92. Common criticism was that it was too close to the two typefaces that inspired it in my view of the densely crowded neogrotesque genre of today, the point sounds dated. Unica was released in 1980, though it didn’t enjoy much success back in the day. The research document titled From Helvetica to Haas Unica ( ) is a wonderful piece of design documentation and well worth a read. After extensive research on the neogrotesques of the time, especially Univers and Helvetica, the team devised a new typeface called Unica whose design intention of combining the two is perfectly captured in the name. The task was given to the three men, André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind, and Christian Mengelt, who formed Team ’77. The Haas Type Foundry which had acquired Deberny & Peignot, the copyright holders of Helvetica and Univers respectively, was set to release a new version of Helvetica for the then new era of electronic phototypesetting. Neue Haas Unica is a revival of Haas Unica, a neogrotesque typeface that was originally released in 1980.