30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typografische Monatsblätter
Lars Müller publishers’ comprehensive retrospective of one of the most important magazines on typography, The book uses an unreleased revival of Haas Unica, named Unica Intermediate designed by Louise Paradis.
Joe Bauldoff has presented an archive of working sketches for the typeface on his Flickr with this accompanying text:
In 1980, Team’77 (consisting of André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt) set out to “correct” common issues found in the grotesk typefaces at the time, including Helvetica.
The Haas type foundry, birthplace of Helvetica (originally Neue Grotesk), contracted Gürtler and Team’77 to audit the Helvetica typeface and reissue an improved version.
Presently, the Linotype and Scangraphic foundries both claim ownership of the type family. Because of this, Haas Unica is commercially unavailable.
Unica Intermediate can also be seen in use in the web archive of TM.
2 Comments on “30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typografische Monatsblätter”
A clarification on the Haas Unica text:
The type design group Team’77 (association between André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind) developed in 1974 a study and concept on the revision of the existing metal Helvetica (TM 4/1980).
The typeface Haas Unica was developed between 1974–1984 by Team’77 due to their studies and under contract with the former Haas Typefoundry as a new sans serif for phototypesetting.
After 1980, the former Linotype, Germany, took over the rights to use Haas Unica for the Linotype phototypesetting systems Linotronic and CRTronic. The name “Haas Unica” was registered by Linotype as a trademark from 1984 to 2005.
No other use of the Haas Unica typeface for phototypesetting systems was approved by anyone from Team’77 at any time.
Meanwhile, different copies and versions of the original Unica typeface were created and used, but rarely was Team’77 questioned as to copyright. The Unica intermediate, designed by Louise Paradis for her excellent book, is in this respect an exception.
Christian Mengelt, August 2014
If you want to learn more about Unica Intermediate, Louise Paradis wrote “The race for Unica” an essay published in issue A (July 2016) of Footnotes, a periodical about type design published by La Police.