Univers – type specimen booklet, Cooper & Beatty, Tony Mann, c1963

The Univers typeface family, designed by Adrian Frutiger for the French foundry Deberny & Peignot, marked a significant development in the evolution of type design. First released in 1957, it was licensed to Monotype for international distribution soon after.

Around 1963, Tony Mann designed this folder of type specimens to introduce the Monotype Univers family at Cooper & Beatty (C&B). It is a excellent example of the International Typographic Style then gaining prominence among Toronto designers.

It showcases the eight Monotype hot-metal faces then available at C&B, although the company had access to all twenty-one Univers fonts on other typesetting systems. Each specimen page shows eleven point sizes for a single typeface. A separate 11 × 17-inch double-sided sheet features an 18-point display of all eight faces on one side and, on the reverse, an abridged article on Univers. The article originally appeared in the January 1961 issue of Typographischen Monatsblätter (TM), the Swiss Typographic Magazine, which devoted the entire issue to the design and production of Univers. The same month, an abridged version of the article was reprinted in Print, the American graphic design magazine.

The C&B archives date this folder to 1966, but several factors suggest an earlier date. Most notably, the folder carries no company branding – an unusual omission for C&B. However, from early 1963 to early 1964, the firm intentionally left its promotional materials unbranded while Tony Mann, newly appointed as Creative Director, developed a new identity to replace the Carl Dair-designed logo (revised by Allan Fleming in 1958). Mann’s new circular mark was introduced in February 1964 and used consistently from that point forward.

Another, less obvious, clue is the significant investment required to purchase 88 new Monotype fonts. It seems unlikely that C&B president Jack Trevett would have waited three years before promoting such a major acquisition.

This Univers folder remains one of the clearest expressions of the International Typographic Style in Canadian graphic design. Even before the launch of C&B’s new identity, Mann had already begun reshaping the company’s visual language.

While some regarded Univers as a more refined design than Helvetica, it was the latter that ultimately dominated the market. Yet, despite Helvetica’s overwhelming popularity, C&B never produced a promotional piece for it that matched the design quality, clarity, or typographic discipline found in this Univers folder. – Rod McDonald

Artifact Text

[from inside flap]

Cooper & Beatty, Limited
Univers is a planned series of type faces, designed and developed together in a logical sequence of weights and widths. The norm around which the family has been built is Univers 55. All variants in the series retain the same basic character, all have the same x-height and can be used together in the same word or line. The same true proportion is maintained throughout all sizes.

Identification of the fonts is by numbers. Weight of letter is graded from 30 to 80, width of letter is graded from 3 to 9, with even numbers denoting italics.

The C&B practice of using J and K to distinguish roman and italic will not be used for this series, but the letter U will preface the series number (U55, U56).

Since Univers was originally designed for the Didot system, some variation of casting sizes from different sources may be experienced, and attention is drawn to the standard sizing as followed by Cooper & Beatty, Limited. Univers is a unique type series. Its fine proportions, high readability and neutral character, combined with the flexibility within the series will, we believe, contribute to its future as the standard type series of our time.