Adrian Frutiger
| Adrian Frutiger | |
|---|---|
Frutiger in 2002
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| Born |
24 May 1928 Unterseen, Bern, Switzerland |
| Died | 10 September 2015 (aged 87) Bremgarten bei Bern, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Alma mater | Kunstgewerbeschule, Zürich |
| Occupation | Typographer & designer |
| Notable work | Univers, Frutiger and Avenir |
Adrian Frutiger (24 May 1928 – 10 September 2015) was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. His career spanned the hot metal, phototypesetting and digital typesetting eras. Until his death, he lived in Bremgarten bei Bern.
Frutiger's most famous designs, Univers, Frutiger and Avenir, are landmark sans-serif families spanning the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, humanist and geometric. Univers was notable for being one of the first sans-serif faces to form a consistent but wide-ranging family, across a range of widths and weights. 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. As a boy, he experimented with invented scripts and stylized handwriting in a negative reaction to the formal, cursive penmanship then required by Swiss schools. His father and his secondary school teachers encouraged him to pursue an apprenticeship rather than pure art. After initially planning to train as a pastry chef, Frutiger secured an apprenticeship at the Otto Schlaefli printing house in Interlaken.
At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed for four years, as a compositor, to the printer Otto Schlaeffli in Interlaken, also taking classes in woodcuts and drawing at the Gewerbeschule in Bern under Walter Zerbe, followed by employment as a compositor at Gebr. Fretz in Zürich, Switzerland. In 1949 he transferred to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Zürich, where he studied under Walter Käch, Karl Schmid and Alfred Willimann until 1951. Students there studied monumental inscriptions from Roman forum rubbings. At the Kunstgewerbeschule, Frutiger concentrated on calligraphy — a craft favouring the nib and the brush, instead of drafting tools, but also began sketches for what would become Univers, influenced by the sans-serif types popular in contemporary graphic design.
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Wikipedia