Adrian Frutiger

"Legibility and beauty stand close together." -Adrian Frutiger


     Adrian Frutiger, Swiss born typeface designer, received his education from apprenticeship and at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts.  After graduating, he worked for a typeface design company in Paris, then started his own studio in Arcueil.  His work has earned many international awards, including; Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz, the Medal of the Type Directors Club of New York and the Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
     His work focused on creating font families and whole systems of typeface. Frutiger was the man guy who came up with the Univers family of fonts.  Other than designing other font families like Apollo and Avenir, Frutiger's impact on modern typography lends itself to recreating the feeling of old metal pressed letter and relief fonts. His goal to incorporate the previous ways of designing text have greatly improved the ways in which we learn and improve our type skills.


In the Univers chart, Frutiger's intentions were to eliminate confusion.  So the 1st number identifies weight while the second defines width and position.