Issue 5

Giants of TypographyAdrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger working on his type

As a boy, Adrian Frutiger dreamed of traveling abroad: “I longed for a distant, sunny land, and for a metropolis where I could achieve something big.” While his travel was always to be modest, he did, indeed, accomplish big things.

Frutiger was born in 1928 in Unterseen, near Interlaken, Switzerland. He grew up in a green valley bordered by lakes amid the Bernese Alps. In his youth, Frutiger became acutely aware of letterforms. At 15, he rebelled against the strict Hulliger method of handwriting taught in German-Swiss schools. He grew interested in the work of writer and teacher Ernst Eberhart, preferring to emulate his freer method of handwriting.

Frutiger cut his pen down to a broad nib and made his letterforms open and round. Those first specimens started him on the path to finding his unique style. He maintained an interest in calligraphic lettering, researching the evolution of the roman script in school and drawing the

I longed for a distant, sunny land, and for a

metropolis where I could achieve something big

Herculanum®, Rusticana™ and Pompeijana™ scripts later in his career.

After compulsory school, Frutiger apprenticed as a compositor, then continued his training at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1949 to 1951. In 1952, Charles Peignot invited the young Frutiger to oversee the drawing office at Deberny & Peignot in Paris. The foundry produced metal type and fonts for the revolutionary Lumitype/Photon phototypesetting systems.

Although living away from his homeland, Swiss traditions still marked Frutiger’s work. He was interested in woodcut techniques and in the Bernese Oberland tradition of making paper silhouettes. He was amazed at the intricacy and precision of the forms that peasant farmers could cut from black paper. “I think it is possible that a deep-seated appreciation of black-and-white contrasts, achieved through the practice of cutout techniques, was present in the genes of the Bernese people and was inherited by me,” Frutiger

All the different variations of Univers

says. “I have always felt a reluctance to use black ink as a medium, preferring whenever possible to scratch, cut or engrave the material.”

Frutiger produced the original drawings for one of his first designs, the Ondine™ typeface, by cutting and pasting black paper shapes. “The black-and-white contrast soon came to play an important part in my professional life,” he says. “The contrast conveys the absolute construction of an image. Taking black away means adding white. In this way, the space between an R and an S becomes like a sculpture for me.”

Frutiger designed more typefaces in the 1950s, including the Meridien® and Phoebus™ designs. His fonts were some of the earliest made for photocomposition printing. Frutiger sealed his international reputation, however, when he created the Univers® typeface for metal and film composition in 1957.

In 1961, Frutiger left Deberny & Peignot to found his own studio outside Paris with Bruno Pfäffli and André Gürtler. He developed custom type for the Charles de Gaulle airport in the early 1970s. Linotype later released the design as Frutiger’s namesake typeface. This led to many additional designs created for Linotype, among them the Avenir®, Centennial®, Serifa® and Didot® designs.

Recently, Linotype released the Capitalis™ typeface family, from Adrian Frutiger. This new family consists of two titling alphabets (Regular and Outline) and a suite of signs and symbols based on images from Frutiger’s book “Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning.” Capitalis is a marked departure from Frutiger’s earlier work. In fact, he confesses that creating the family was a liberation for him. After working on so many structured and meticulously constructed typefaces, he says that creating this new design was “a breath of fresh air.”

Frutiger in situ

• Ondine (1954)• President (1954)• Meridien (1955)• Egyptienne (1956)• Univers (1954)• Apollo (1962)• Serifa (1967)• OCR-B (1968)

• Iridium (1975)• Frutiger (for Charles de

Gaulle Airport 1975)• Glypha (1977)• Icone (1980)• Breughel (1982)• Versailles (1982)• Linotype Centennial

(1986)• Avenir (1988)• Westside (1989)• Herculanum (1990)• Vectora (1990)• Linotype Didot (1991)• Pompeijana (1992)• Rusticana (1993)

• Frutiger Stones (1998)• Frutiger Symbols (1998)• Linotype Univers (1999)• Frutiger Next (2000)• Nami (2006)• Frutiger Arabic (2007)• Frutiger Serif (2008)• Neue Frutiger (2009)

Adrian Frutiger

Frutiger is also an accomplished painter, sculptor, symbologist and mathematician. He has authored a number of books on type and design, and his work with signs and symbols is legendary. He has taught at the Ecole Estienne and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, both in Paris.

Frutiger has been honored with numerous accolades within his long career. These include the Gutenberg Prize (Mainz, Germany), the Type Directors Club Medal, the French Grand Prix National des Arts Graphiques and the Society of Typographic Aficionados Typography Award.