Gerard Unger was born in Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1942; as a young man, he studied graphic design, typography and type design (1963-67) and then went on to work at Total Design, Prad and Joh. Enschedé before establishing himself as an independent designer, going freelance in 1975.
The original inspiration for the Swift typeface was the movement of the similarly named bird – particularly the soaring and sweeping motions made through the sky as it flew. This influence can be seen in the curves and angles of the typeface which, despite its newspaper feel remains a very lyrical artistic achievement. It was released by Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH (commonly abbreviated to “Hell” – German for “Bright”) in 1985.
The subsequent re-release, Swift 2.0, re-drawn from scratch using Postscript outlines. Since the original Swift had been digitized using the subsequently defunct IKARUS system, a new version of the font was warranted. This font was published by Unger himself in 1995.
The extension of the Swift font family resulting in Neue Swift was made possible by the collaboration of Unger and Linotype; the OpenType font released as a result contained not only a greatly extended character set but also many new glyphs per letter. This would allow the typeface to be used in a variety of countries for which it had, until that time, not been suitable. The Neue Swift font family was published in 2009.
Reference:
Linotype: Neue Swift
Linotype: Meet Neue Swift
