Gerard Unger

Swift, Gerard Unger, 1985 The Dutch designer Gerard Unger first drew Swift in the early 1980s for Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, the German typesetting company whose clients around the world included many newspapers. Its giant serifs and pronounced shapes were meant to make it close to indestructible in the rough world of newspaper printing, and Unger named it after the bird for being compact, efficient, quick and elegant. It brought a breath of fresh air to 1980s newspaper design, and it now turns up in books, advertising and corporate identities too; the sample here is its later revision, Neue Swift. Unger kept going: his Gulliver set USA Today and the Stuttgarter Zeitung, and Coranto went to The Scotsman.