Avenir, Frutiger, Univers, Vectora, are just some of the +30 fonts designed by the iconic typeface artists, Adrian Frutiger (1928-2015). His typefaces grace signage and print across the world, from London, to eBay, to highway signs everywhere. What made this versatility possible, was Frutiger’s ability to create something new, again, and again, and again.
He first broke the mold when he introduced Universe, a large system of 21 variations for which the fist digital number where the weight of the characters and the second signified their width (instead of the traditional type foundry’s three typefaces, lean, bold and italic). He went on to create some the world’s most popular type, combining technical aspect with emotive force, to produce simple and effective typeface. Frutiger built a bridge with fonts, taking them from typesetting in metal types, to fonts printed with a beam of light.
One of his greatest feats was simplifying the sacred characters of the Devanagari, adapting it to modern printing processes and typesetting without compromising it’s ancient calligraphic expression.
“Legibility and beauty stand close together and type design, in its restraint, should only be felt but not perceived by the reader,” he said. But, then again, he also said that “If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape.”
Very good