![]() He taught us to transfer these forms to Grotesque fonts. ![]() He always compared carved inscriptions with the sans serif, since these were not contrast-rich thick/thin Roman typefaces. He showed us, after making rubbings of Roman inscriptions, that an up-stroke is thinner than a down-stroke and that in the curves you can find beautiful variations between thick and thin. First of all, my studies with Walter Käch. YS-S: What was the main impulse for Univers? Was it the schools, Charles Peignot, phototypesetting technology, rational French thinking…?ĪF: It was everything together. Univers is nearer to Roman than other sans serifs, since it displays a visual sensitivity between thick and thin in the up- and down-strokes, in the verticals and the horizontals. He wanted to emphasise the contrast with the Constructivist idea, where the ‘o’ is simply a circle and where there is no differentiation between the horizontal and the vertical. YS-S: Emil Ruder wrote that Univers, as Roman-Grotesque, ended the ideological struggle between Roman and sans serif.ĪF: Ruder only said that this font links up again with the Roman. We needed something more contemporary, nearer to the roman. But we didn’t like the Bauhaus much the work was too constructed and rigid. At the school they worked with Akzidenz Grotesque and Neue Haas Grotesque and I lived for about ten years in this sans serif environment. Why a sans serif and not a roman face? Was this the influence of Bauhaus?Īdrian Frutiger: Typography in Switzerland was more oriented to the sans serif than to Roman type. Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin: You developed the first drawings for Univers during your studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. This relaxed and wide-ranging conversation took place during the 1998 ATypI conference, held last October in Lyons, France. Univers is proving to be one of the most important and enduring typefaces of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of structured diversity. Throughout the modern world, from megastore to corner shop, text set in Frutiger’s Univers sings out from a thousand different magazine, books, posters and CD covers. And when you travel the city on the Metro, the station signage uses Frutiger’s Métro alphabet. You take the train to the centre: linear bands of rope-drawn signs of script in concrete at the railway station. arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, you are welcomed by signage in the sans serif face called Frutiger. Significant honours include the Chevalier de l’Order des Arts et Lettres, the Gutenburg Prize of the city of Mainz and the 1986 Type Medal of the Type Directors Club of New York.įrutiger has always embraced the technology of his time, from hot metal, through phototypesetting to digitisation. He taught for ten years at the Ecole Estienne, Paris, and for eight years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. He has written several books about typography, signs and symbols, including Signs and Symbols (Ebury Press), Development of Western Type, Typografie and Geometry of Feelings (Syndor Press). In 1960, Frutiger established a design studio with Andre Gürtler and Bruno Pfäffli, His commissions have included logotypes, signage systems and maps, with clients such as Air France, IBM and the Swiss Post Office. Other typefaces designed by Frutiger include Avenir, Centennial, Egyptienne, Glyphia, Iridium, Icone, OCR-B (the standard alphabet for optical character recognition) Seifa and Versailles, plus in-house typefaces for corporations such as BP and Shiseido. After initial acclaim for his font Méridien (1954) Frutiger soon established an international reputation by designing the Univers family of sans serif faces (1954-57). In 1952 he as hired by Charles Peignot, of the type foundry Deberny & Peignot, as a youthful artistic director. After an apprenticeship as a compositor in Interlaken, he studied from 1949-51 at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich. For more than 45 years the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger, born in 1928, has been a hugely influential figure in typography.
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