A LEGENDARY REDESIGN OF HELVETICA | Reborn After 30 Years

If you have eyeballs, you’ve almost certainly seen Helvetica. It’s one of the most widely used typefaces ever created, so popular that it generated a documentary examining its popularity. It’s almost equally certain that you have not seen Haas Unica, the typeface designed to be Helvetica’s sequel of sorts. Introduced in 1980, it was lost to history almost instantly upon its arrival.

Now, after languishing in obscurity for decades, Unica has been rescued and remastered. Drawn to be legible at small sizes, it could be a perfect Helvetica-substitute for user interfaces and other on-screen text elements. For designers, though, the new Unica is an exciting visitor from the past.

Designed for short blasts of texts like headlines and advertisements, Helvetica didn’t always look great at small sizes or when used for lengthy blocks of text. And because it had been designed for the hot metal typesetting techniques prevalent in the 1950s, it hadn’t translated perfectly to the phototypesetting process that became popular in the 1970s.

So, in 1974, Haas, the centuries-old Swiss type foundry that had introduced Helvetica, commissioned a Swiss design team called Team’77 to come up with a follow-up to the world’s most popular typeface.

By the time they finished Unica, Haas was going out of business. The typographic world was on the verge of being rocked by another new technology: desktop publishing. The advent of personal computers, particularly the Macintosh, would make it possible to experiment with type in tremendous new ways. Phototypesetting, for which Unica had been designed, was quickly losing relevance. As a result, Unica got lost in the shuffle.

To your eyes and mine, the differences between Unica and Helvetica will be nearly imperceptible. The cross-stroke on the capital Q has been nudged slightly upward. The lower-case t has been shaved at the top. 

Helvetica looks so great when it’s handled skillfully and used for these big bold graphic treatments, but as an everyday information typeface, it falls a little flat. Univers is crisp and clean and it’s great, but it is a little cold.

Unica hits a sweet spot between the two, Not quite as quirky as Helvetica, not quite as dispassionate as Univers. Unica is beautiful, crisp, and modern and rationalized.