| Date: 1793
Designer:
Johann Friedrich Unger
Foundry:
Unger founder and printer
Location:
Haarlem, Holland
Current equivalent:
Berthold BQ Unger Fraktur
Technologies:
Metal (foundry)
Metal (machine)
Postscript | | Famous for:
The first hybrid romanesque fraktur. Applications: Book Publishing & General Purpose Text Setting Ubiquity:
Not widely used Category:
Blackletter Fraktur/Modern Roman
Stress: Vertical
Serif: Calligraphic | | Design history:
As with the fraktur of his contemporary Breitkopf, Unger's typeface represented a radical departure from previous styles of blackletter, and can be seen as a visible manifestation of the baroque period. In the late 1700s a rationalisation of German type measurement had adopted the Didot point system throughout the printing industries, and Johann Friedrich Unger, as the German distributor and promoter of Didot's roman type, attempted to make a fraktur typeface that would harmonise with the severity of Didot's modern face. The result was a critical success – an open and stately fraktur, giving a much lighter tonality on the printed page. It was accompanied by numerals that followed the latin, rather than the gothic model. | |  | |  |
