80 | Graphic Design Theory
friend of Ruder, offered Basel a progressive approach to the arrangement of
typography. The design of Univers was ideal for Ruder’s own typographic work
and that of his students, especially favored by Hans-Rudolf Lutz who studied at
the Basel school for one year from 1963 to 1964. Lutz and a few of his colleagues
designed typographic pictures that would have been difficult to compose in
any other typeface.
Since the invention of book printing, Univers was the first entire font
system to be designed with interchangeable weights, proportions, and corre-
sponding italics. In the design of older typefaces visual alignment among
such variations was not a standard consideration. For a given size of type
all twenty-one variations of Univers, whether light, regular, medium, bold,
condensed, expanded, or italic, had the same X-height (the height of lowercase
letters without ascenders or descenders) and the same baseline. This simplified
letterpress printing and increased the possibilities for visual contrast in tone,
weight, width, and direction, available in eleven sizes for metal typesetting.
When I came to the Basel School of Design the coarse Berthold Akzidenz-
Grotesk, so rarely used, was fast asleep in the type drawer under a blanket of
dust. I woke it up.wolfgang weIngart Example
of typographic experiments at Basel
School of Design, 1968–1971. Weingart
notes, “The word ‘schön,’ set in bold
with two fine points above it, defined
my idea of beauty.”