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 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.ДЇrutiger 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 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 ZГјrich, he had begun to sketch a revived grotesque family based on 19th-century grotesques, at the time considered antiquated outside Switzerland. He described Univers in 1998 as having a 'visual sensitivity between thick and thin' strokes, avoiding perfect geometry. Дifferent 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 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.

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