Description:

‘Twenty Typefaces That Changed the World’ is a response to an editorial design brief, with the objective of employing grid systems to organise large amounts of content, and creating typographic hierarchies to aid readability and make information accessible. In addition, the project's aim is to showcase typographic development in response to commercial needs and aesthetic trends and to showcase how certain models have endured well past the cultures that spawned them, recognising the need to identify the stages of type-form development.

By utilising generous negative space, scale and a light paper stock to show through, it has emphasised the structure, layout and hierarchies in place. In addition, the use of monochromatic colour application throughout the main book, it showcases the characteristics and structure of the typefaces. It has categorised the typefaces through the VOX Classification, ranging from Old-style Serifs to Geometric Sans Serifs.

For the twentieth typeface, the project required a type specimen that features and classifies one contemporary typeface family that has been released in the last decade. I chose Neue Haas Unica to fulfil this segment of the brief.

The typeface was originally released in 1980, by the Haas Type Foundry for the phototypesetting technology of the day. It was originally designed as a hybrid of two existing typefaces, Helvetica and Univers, where Haas had identified a space between the two influential fonts.
The design was never successfully updated for today’s digital environments, until 2015. Toshi Omagari of Monotype Studio analysed Unica and gave this neglected classic a fresh, digital facelift with more weights, more language support and a larger glyph set to meet today’s digital and print needs.

As a typeface which was spawned in the 1980s, and only digitalised decades later, Neue Haas Unica is the epitome of a model which has endured. Available in 18 styles, it is appropriate for a wide range of applications, possessing a delicate gradation of weights and well-defined character forms. In addition to its 9 tailored weights and complementary italics, the Neue Haas Unica family also possesses additional characters for Eastern and Central European, Greek and Cyrillic language support, which did not exist in the original design.

The specimen is a small booklet, which sits on the inside cover of the dust jacket encasing the book, overlaid by the grid employed within the booklet. Throughout the specimen, the structural and informational elements of Unica are highlighted, in addition to comparing and contrasting it to Helvetica and Univers. Additionally, to emphasise the structural and aesthetic merits of the typeface, it is compared to Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design, as well as Rams’ industrial design over the years.