Adrian Frutiger
Adrian Frutiger Adrian Frutiger was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century. His career extended from the hot metal, phototypesetting to digital typesetting eras. Frutiger's most famous designs are Univers, Frutiger and Avenir. They are the landmark sans-serif families covering the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, humanist and geometric. Univers was notable for being one of the first sans-serif faces to form a consistent but wide-ranging family, across a range of widths and weights. Frutiger described creating sans-serif types as his "main life's work," partially due to the difficulty in designing them compared to serif fonts.
Born
24 May 1928
Died
10 September 2015
Nationality Swiss Alma mater Kunstgewerbeschule, Zürich
The beginning
Occupation Typographer & designer
Adrian Frutiger was born in Unterseen, Canton of Bern in Switzerland. As a boy, he experimented with invented scripts and stylised handwriting. His father and his secondary school teachers encouraged him to pursue an apprenticeship rather than pure art. After initially planning to train as a pastry chef, Frutiger secured an apprenticeship at the Otto Schlaefli printing house in Interlaken.
Formative years At the age of sixteen, he was an apprentice for four years, as a compositor, to the printer Otto Schlaeffli in Interlaken. He also took classes in woodcuts and drawing at the Gewerbeschule in Bern under Walter Zerbe, then was employed as a compositor at Gebr. Fretz in Zürich, Switzerland. In 1949 he transferred to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Zürich, where he studied under Walter Käch, Karl Schmid and Alfred Willimann until 1951. Frutiger concentrated on calligraphy — a craft favouring the nib and the brush, instead of drafting tools, but also began sketches for what would become Univers, influenced by the sans-serif types popular in contemporary graphic design.
Career Adrian Frutiger was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century. His career extended from the hot metal, phototypesetting to digital typesetting eras. Frutiger's most famous designs are Univers, Frutiger and Avenir. They are the landmark sans-serif families covering the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, humanist and geometric. Univers was notable for being one of the first sans-serif faces to form a consistent but wide-ranging family, across a range of widths and weights. Frutiger described creating sans-serif types as his "main life's work," partially due to the difficulty in designing them compared to serif fonts.
Specimens of typefaces by Adrian Frutiger.
Univers Charles Peignot envisioned a large, unified font family, that might be set in both the metal and the photo-composition systems. Impressed by the success of the Bauer foundry's Futura typeface, Peignot encouraged a new, geometric sans-serif type in competition. Frutiger disliked the regimentation of Futura, and persuaded Peignot that the new sans-serif should be based on the realist (neo-grotesque) model. The 1896 face, Akzidenz-Grotesk, is cited as the primary model. To maintain unity across the 21 variants, each weight and width, in roman (upright) and oblique (slanted), was drawn and approved before any matrices were cut. In the Univers font, Frutiger introduced his two-digit numeration; the first digit (3 through 8) indicates the weight, "3" the lightest, "8" the heaviest. The second digit indicates the face-width and either roman or oblique. It was marketed with a design inspired by the periodic table. The response to Univers was immediate and positive; he claimed it became the model for his future typefaces. His slab serif designs Serifa (1967) and Glypha (1977) are directly based upon it.
Univers typeface on street signs in London, England.
Frutiger In 1970, Frutiger was asked to design signage at the new Charles de Gaulle Airport in the Roissy suburb of Paris. The "way-finding-signage" commission brief required a typeface both legible from afar and from an angle. Frutiger decided to adapt Concorde using legibility research as a guide, and titled the new design Roissy. In 1974, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company commissioned Frutiger to develop a print version of Roissy with improvements such as better spacing, which was released for public use under the name of Frutiger in 1976. Extremely legible at a distance or at small size, Frutiger became hugely influential on the development of future humanist sans-serif typefaces; font designer Erik Spiekermann described it as "the best general typeface ever" while Steve Matteson described it as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes. Frutiger is an amalgamation of Univers tempered with organic influences of the Gill Sans, a humanist sans-serif typeface by Eric Gill, Edward Johnston's type for the London Transport, and Roger Excoffon's Antique Olive: like Univers it uses a single-story 'g', unlike the double of Gill Sans, and has square dots on the letters, but has a generally humanist design with wide apertures to increase legibility, decided on after legibility research.
Frutiger typeface on a road sign near Lugano in Switzerland.
Avenir In 1988, Frutiger completed the family Avenir. He intended the design to be a more human version of geometric sans-serif types popular in the 1930s such as Erbar and Futura, and it is named Avenir (future in French) as a reference. Frutiger has described Avenir as his finest work. “The quality of the draughtsmanship – rather than the intellectual idea behind it – is my masterpiece. It was the hardest typeface I have worked on in my life. Working on it, I always had human nature in mind. And what's crucial is that I developed the typeface alone, in peace and quiet – no drafting assistants, no-one was there. My personality is stamped upon it. I'm proud that I was able to create Avenir.”
Avenir used by the election campaign of French president François Hollande.
Adrian Frutiger’s contribution to the world
Frutiger typface on Swiss passport
Frutiger typface on Euro notes
Univers typface used for the Unicef logo
Univers typface used for the Black & Decker logo
Avenir typface used for the BBC Two logo
Avenir typface used for the ‘I amsterdam’ sign