Lately, I have rediscovered another favorite - Myriad. An American typeface, that takes off from where Frutiger's self titled 'Frutiger' left. Myriad is a truly superb typeface that can be, like Univers, used for many purposes as a versatile, legible, modern sans serif.
My favourite, here in 2004.
From Robert Bringhurst - Elements of Typographic Style:
Designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly and issused by Adobe in 1991. Myriad, like Frutiger, is full of subltle and open geometric forms. Like Frutiger, it lacks text figures and small caps, but unlike Frutiger, it includes what might be called a real italic. In its multiple master form, it is continously adjustable for weights and width.
Myriad is originally design in digital form.
[1] This 'cultural neutrality' or 'lack of individuality' has been largely associated with Modernism and its utopian ideal of a universal language.
Extract from Ellen Lupton's insightful article:
This initially was fueled by the belief that cultural differences and historical change could be transcended by a supposedly 'universal' language of geometric grids, systematic typography, simplified drawings, and objective photographs. As modernism became an official corporate and institutional style in the 1950's and 1960's, many architects and graphic designers questioned its aesthetic and philosophical principles. What had begun as a radically democratic methodology came to be seen as elitist, anti-individualistic, and overly abstract. Myraid, designed in the 90s could then be called a neo-modernist. That which takes the already established principles of Mondernism and adds to it a sense of individualism and personality.
