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He had found “the big original pattern drawings and the film negatives that had so much more clarity and detail and form than any of the scans of text sizes that I had seen.”Įven better, the rights to work with these files had transferred down to Monotype, meaning that the company was free to begin reviving and reworking it. “I was going through their archives… and I discovered the original production materials from Unica,” Rhatigan said. However, when Rhatigan went to Monotype’s German offices-which were owned by Linotype before Monotype’s 2006 acquisition of the company-in search of material for Monotype’s 2012 Pencil to Pixel exhibition, he made a surprising discovery. Mastering Type: The Essential Guide to Typography for Print and Web Design by Denise Bosler “But I had only seen a couple of examples of it ever in use, and what everyone pretty much understood was that there was a sort of murkiness about the rights because it had been prepared by a succession of companies that went out of business.” “I had been really impressed with the design process of the original appearance and its comparisons that showed how well it sat in between Helvetica and Univers,” he said.

Rhatigan had learned this history in online discussion threads about Unica, and he had scans of the original analysis documents that Team ’77 had prepared. The original version of Unica had also been digitized once before and released by the company Scangraphic, but because it was created without the original phototypesetting files, Scangraphic’s adaptation was limited. And as these companies went out of business, the rights transferred to the surviving companies.” “Stempel controlled a lot of Haas, Haas controlled a lot of Stempel. Rhatigan already knew about Unica’s original release by the Swiss foundry Haas in 1980, and about the ambiguous rights that had played a part in limiting its prior adaptation for digital.Īt that time, “Haas was partially controlled by another foundry called Stempel, which did a lot of production work for Haas and Linotype through the chain of commercial interest of a lot of type foundries in the 20th Century,” Rhatigan said. I was fortunate enough to speak with Monotype’s Dan Rhatigan, who discovered the lost Unica phototypesetting files and is well-versed in its history. The font family was resurrected for the digital realm by Monotype’s Toshi Omagari, who gave it a facelift and added more weights, languages and letters. While its parent typefaces prospered, Unica was not adapted for digital use, and the original phototypesetting files were lost-until now. Unfortunately, the Unica faded from use in the late ’80s as the world transitioned to desktop publishing and phototypesetting became obsolete. The typeface was meant to be less formal than Univers and less mannered than Helvetica-yet still as clean and versatile as both.

Monotype announced the release of Neue Haas Unica, a contemporary and digital-friendly revival of the typeface Unica.Ĭreated in 1980 by Team ’77 for the Haas Type Foundry, Unica represented a marriage of Helvetica and Univers.