Imago is one of a vast array of typefaces, called the Berthold Exklusiv Collection, created for the Berthold typeface foundry. This initiative, to create new typefaces that would always be associated with the foundry, was conceived by Gunter Gerhard Lange, who served as the foundry’s artistic director from 1960 until 1990. It was Lange himself who designed Imago, which was released in 1982. Building on the foundry’s crown jewel, Akzidenz-Grotesk®, and other popular sans serif typefaces like Univers®, he was nonetheless determined to create a typeface with its own style and personality. He succeeded brilliantly with Imago.

What Lange did with Imago was to make the appearance of the different letterforms more consistent than they were in the earlier sans serifs, which contributed to Imago’s appearance of uniformity and balance. To make the face distinct, Lange slightly squared the bowls in both the upper – and lowercase character sets; in addition, he built the numerals slightly shorter than the cap height.

References:
http://www.identifont.com/similar?OX
http://www.linotype.com/261374/imagobe-family.html#
http://www.itcfonts.com/Fonts/detail.htm?ProductID=265164

Imago, with its distinctive and unified appearance, is highly legible and can be considered appropriate for all applications, both hard-copy and onscreen. In its heavier weights it’s an excellent selection for display and signage, as well as for package design and advertising headlines. In its lighter weights, it’s well-suited for continual text applications, including newspaper and magazine text, books, reports and presentations. It has varying stroke widths, but they’re carefully thought out, and the typeface stands up well under the pressures of multiple generation, such as photocopying and faxing. Imago thus is an ideal typeface for internal correspondence within organizations.