26 Facts About Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger's career spanned the hot metal, phototypesetting and digital typesetting eras.

Adrian Frutiger described creating sans-serif types as his "main life's work", partially due to the difficulty in designing them compared to serif fonts.

Adrian Frutiger was born in Unterseen, Canton of Bern, the son of a weaver.

Adrian Frutiger married Paulette Fluckiger in 1952, who died in 1954 after the birth of their son Stephane.

Adrian Frutiger spent most of his professional career working in Paris and living in France, returning to Switzerland later in life.

Adrian Frutiger's wood-engraved illustrations of the essay demonstrated his skill, meticulousness, and knowledge of letter forms.

Adrian Frutiger disliked the regimentation of Futura, and persuaded Peignot that the new sans-serif should be based on the realist model.

In 1970, Adrian Frutiger was asked to design signage at the new Charles de Gaulle Airport in the Roissy suburb of Paris.

Adrian Frutiger decided to adapt Concorde using legibility research as a guide, and titled the new design Roissy.

In 1974, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company commissioned Adrian Frutiger to develop a print version of Roissy with improvements such as better spacing, which was released for public use under the name of Adrian Frutiger in 1976.

Extremely legible at a distance or at small size, Adrian 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.

Adrian Frutiger's intention was more unusual: to create a design that could be modified by computer, through extreme slanting, morphing or changing stroke width, without seeming as if it had been distorted.

Adrian Frutiger designed a number of other signage projects in the 1970s.

Adrian Frutiger designed a slab serif font for the Centre Pompidou.

Adrian Frutiger's 1984 typeface Versailles is an old-style serif text with capitals like those in the earlier President.

Adrian Frutiger 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 as a reference to the latter.

In 1991, Adrian Frutiger finished Vectora, a design influenced by Morris Fuller Benton's type faces Franklin Gothic and News Gothic.

Adrian Frutiger's 1991 release Linotype Didot was an elegant revival of the Didot typeface adapted to display use, which remains popular; it is the version of Didot bundled with OS X, for example.

Linotype launched a font series named "Type before Gutenberg" in 1989 and in the 1990s, Adrian Frutiger released as part of it a series of designs inspired by pre-printing alphabets, such as Herculanum and Pompeijana, inspired by Roman brush lettering, Rusticana, inspired by Roman carving.

Adrian Frutiger later created Frutiger Stones, a playful design inspired by the shapes of pebbles.

Adrian Frutiger created Capitalis, inspired by brush lettering but without a specific historical source.

Nami, an uncial design Adrian Frutiger had been considering since 1992, followed in 2007.

Univers was reissued as Linotype Univers with sixty-three variants; Adrian Frutiger was reissued as Adrian Frutiger Next with additional weights.

Adrian Frutiger died on 10 September 2015, in Bremgarten bei Bern at the age of 87.

Adrian Frutiger designed a word mark for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India.

Adrian Frutiger designed small vignettes for the book of prayers of the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland, performing the work pro bono.