Rob,
They both came out at the same time in the mid 50s. There are those who are in one camp or another. I much prefer Univers because it is much more thought out as a family and just feels right to me.

ChrisL

Helvetica was drawn by an idealist. Univers was drawn by a type designer.

Univers is a further departure from the original 19th-century models. Helvetica is essentially a 19th-century grot cleaned up and sanitised for modern consumption. It’s very monoline, the letters are very unified in shape and width. Univers takes the model and adjusts the widths, stroke contrast, curves and aperture to be more clean, soft, simple, and truly modern. If you compare Univers with AG or other older grotesques, it looks visibly newer. Unlike Helvetica, Univers has letters of more classic roman proportions; compare R, A, S, E, B and D between Helvetica and Univers to see this proportion modulation. Helvetica is nearly monospaced in its width consistency. Helvetica’s apertures are more closed, most notably in c, a, S, C and e. Oddly, while Univers is as squarish as Helvetica, its higher stroke contrast relieves what in Helvetica is a blocky and heavy appearance. Univers is a more evolved design; Frutiger completely adapted it for 20th-century use. More important than all of these, Univers is spaced for text, which immediately makes it more suitable for small sizes.

Type represents the technology of its day.
Arial is a revival of Helvetica, which in turn is a revival of Akzidenz Grotesk, a 19th century letterform.
Helvetica has the shape of steam engine boilers and cast iron machinery.
Univers, on the other hand, has the “supercurve” (as Zapf termed it, and also used in Melior) of the CRT, the TV screen. This is more obvious, even, in Frutiger’s original drawings. Novarese’s Microgramma/Eurostile, is the most CRT-shaped face.
But ultimately, all those types still have a lot of lead in them, in particular that means quite subtle spacing (despite complaints about Helvetica as a text face).
More recent developments in type design take their sources from other media, less finely spaced than print. For instance highway signage (Interstate, DIN) typewriters (Officina), neon, and low res monitors. So now the vertical linearity of ’l’ and ’i” become problematic, hence emergence of “some serifs” (to use the Berlow term) in sans faces, because these features help to moderate letterspacing.

Nick, very interesting analysis. Gosh, I love reading thoughtful texts about type.

And beautiful work with the Globe and Mail!

~Roy Wilhelm
a publication designer in Richmond, Va.

*adds to project list for summer: make Helvetica v Univers text-figure animation fight à la stick-figure fighting videos*

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Both are better avoided (especially Helvetica, which is dated and gross).
But if you must ask the Helvetica vs Univers question, the answer is Unica.

hhp

Nick, that really is a great answer. Very thoughtful, as Roy said.

BTW: http://typophile.com/node/33285

:->

hhp

The big difference is personality. Being a revival of Akzidenz-Grotesk with the life sucked out, Helvetica has almost none. Univers, on the other hand, has a cool technocratic feeling that borders on arrogance. I prefer to see Helvetica as a big display face, so that those big bones take on a warm feeling. I use Univers when I need to set a bunch of text and want it to look thoughtful and precise, and carry an air of authority.

Gurtler + Haas Unica related links

http://typophile.com/node/4840 -
http://typophile.com/node/18387 -
http://typophile.com/node/12529 -
http://typophile.com/node/30859

BTW I think Univers is always beguiling. Especially the numbers.

Interesting analysis Nick.

While different, just out of curiosity, how would you characterize Champion & Knockout?

Re-reading this thread I wanted thank Rob for bringing up a question I thought I basically knew the answers to - and to Carl & Nick for answers extended my knowlege. Now I am keen for more questions about stuff I falsely think I already have my head around. Cheers!

James, what are your feeling about the new Univers compared with the old?

Knockout: strikes me as exemplifying hands-on engineering (which will make ad hoc adjustments to optimize the efficiency of each part) rather than the smoothly consistent systematic exigesis of design principles, and in that is characteristic of the 19th century.

You see that still in Helvetica, where the “a” has a foot serif in the light weights, but not in the bold.

Two references to support this view of the Victorian engineer: Brunel working himself to death on the details of his huge projects, because the appropriate infrastructure of a large engineering firm had yet to be developed; and Maudslay, inventor of the bench micrometer, the “finest man with a file” (sorry, can’t find the exact quote), very much the craftsman.

Interesting thread, everyone.

re: Brunel, I recommend a superb book called The Great Iron Ship by James Dugan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953) that describes Brunel in loving detail as he worked on his masterpiece, the Great Eastern, which laid the transatlantic cable. Of course he did so much more than that, including railway right-of-way design, Temple Meads Station, bridges, and so forth. One cool cat.

Nick so rightly plants Helvetica’s roots in the 19th century. Has anyone come across a comment that 19th-c. types wanted to express a kind of egalitariansim that was increasingly present in a society that was moving from industrial revolution into a time with much more social consciousness? It is so instructive to see a line of Helvetica set in A/C compared to something like Syntax or Penumbra, in which the allegedly desirable trait of all letters being “equal” actually reduces legibility and recognition of individual identity. I have the feeling that I read this perhaps back in early 70s when I first started getting passionately interested in type, but for the life of me I can’t remember where.

Although HZ may refer to that meeting point between a square and a circle as “supercurve” I think we have to give credit to Gabriel Lamé and Piet Hein. Apparently there is some controversy as to whether HZ came up with the idea in Melior on his own, or if his abiding interest in things mathematical may have led him to see the work of these others at an earlier time, perhaps filing it away sub-consciously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Lam%C3%A9

http://www.oberonplace.com/products/plotter/tutor/lesson2.htm

I don’t get to come here as much as I would like to, but boy oh boy does Typophile give me good brain food! Not that everyone will read it in this one thread, but I hereby thank all of you for your curiosity, your wide-ranging interests, and your willingness to set them down in type for the rest of us to read. Great, great stuff.

I guess in being a student I’ve been completely turned off by helvetica. Everyone uses it in excess, or they use the crazy scribbly freeware typefaces that are already messy.

In response to Nick’s first comment, arial was created to try to beat helvetica for windows platforms, not to renew it, but in regards to everything else, right on.

I’m glad this discussion came up because I frequently argue with friends but it becomes an argument on form and usefulness and does not contain nearly as much historical background.

I discovered Univers about two years ago. I appreciate it for it’s versatility and it will always be superior to helvetica in my eyes. Every possible combination of weights looks amazing together, and although I know this is subjective I really truly feel that way. I even refered to the actual universe as the “univers” in writing. Real smart, I know.

arial was created to try to beat helvetica for windows platforms, not to renew it,

I used the term “revival”, which is a quite specific typographic euphemism. “Renew” has a more general meaning.

In other design areas, what we call revivals are often termed reproductions or imitations.

Adrian Frutiger created Univers from scratch — starting with original drawings.

> a quite specific typographic euphemism.

Actually it’s used quite loosely by most of us.

hhp

And I wouldn’t term them euphemisms — well, at least, not those done well. But some have truly “passed on.”

Arial is not a revival of Helvetica.

According to Mark Simonson Arial seems to be an adaptation of Monotype’s grotesque series made by Birmy to match Helvetica’s spacing so it could be substituted without disrupting a document’s text flow.

Microsoft adopted Arial instead of Helvetica because of licensing and price issues but Microsoft didn’t create Arial.

All this I learned at Mark Simonson’s “The scourge of Arial”.

Héctor

Héctor, would you please list a print source for that? I have seen the Arial/Monotype Grot connection mentioned many times but never seen anything substantial written on the subject. I find it a curious claim, as Arial really resembles Helvetica whereas MT Grot looks, at least to me, to have grown out of late 19th century light grotesk designs.

Edit: Nevermind, I just found the article.