On May 24th Adrian Frutiger cel­e­brated his 80th birth­day. To mark the occa­sion I wrote this text for the Swiss mag­a­zine Hochparterre:

Mr. Univers

When you get to a cer­tain age, like myself, you often get asked who your influ­ences were and are. An easy response is to name nation­ally or inter­na­tion­ally renowned favourites such as Gandhi or Albert Schweitzer. One’s own par­ents tend to score high on the list, at least if they’re still living and able to read the acco­lades. As far as I’m con­cerned my choice has been a simple one for over 30 years: I first met Adrian Frutiger in 1976, and to this day he remains my idol.

Adrian as a colleague

He was the best of col­leagues; he gave advice, dis­cussed issues, lis­tened and had time for ques­tions which a novice like me could barely for­mu­late prop­erly. At the annual ATypI meet­ings, which in those days were still pretty small, all the type design­ers knew one another. Most of them were con­nected to a man­u­fac­turer, who sold their type­set­ting machines as well as the type­faces that went with them. So the design­ers were really com­peti­tors, yet the atmos­phere was friendly nev­er­the­less, as is usu­ally the case when­ever spe­cial­ists get together in a busi­ness as man­age­able as type design was at the time.

We met a little later in pri­vate at Walter Greisner’s, then head of D. Stem­pel AG, the type foundry within the Lino­type group. In the small world of type design­ers there was no room for big egos, and as a friend of the house I was allowed to be on first name terms with my hero from the start. I had only just turned 30 and had not yet designed my own type­face, but after having got to know Adrian I was deter­mined to give it a go.

Univers 1957

Frutiger had just released a Lino­type type­face named after him­self, which he had orig­i­nally devel­oped for the sig­nage at Roissy air­port (now Charles de Gaulle). Nearly 20 years pre­vi­ously, in 1957, his Univers was released by Deberny & Peignot in Paris. The same year, by the way, that the Cit­roen DS was intro­duced – a sim­i­larly rad­i­cal design. Hel­vetica, too, dates from this period. It was con­ceived as a com­mer­cial response to the suc­cess of the German Akzi­denz Grotesk, which was highly rated by the Swiss design­ers due to its neu­tral robust­ness. The Neue Haas Grotesk, as Hel­vetica was first known, was from Münchenstein near Basel and was intended as a refine­ment (or sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, if you like) of exist­ing type­faces. Univers, on the other hand, was con­ceived as some­thing new right from the start: as a system of com­ple­men­tary degrees of bold­ness and width form­ing a family of 21 weights. This incred­i­ble project, for which umpteen thou­sand steel stamps had to be engraved (each char­ac­ter in each size), was the brain­child of a type designer from the Bernese Ober­land who, not yet 30 years old, had been given free rein by his employer in Paris to under­take this enor­mous task.

This rev­o­lu­tion­ary type project breathed some fresh air into the Swiss design scene. Back then there were design fac­tions which were not only clas­si­fi­able by cities and schools, but also by their loy­alty to cer­tain type­faces. Soon there were not only Akzi­denz Grotesk sup­port­ers, but also a Univers fac­tion, not to men­tion the Hel­vetica com­mu­nity. Every type­face has its own design canon, thus for many design­ers the choice of type­face was at the same time a choice of direc­tion. There were few choices of type­faces at the time, because each only being avail­able on cer­tain type­set­ting sys­tems, the choice was depen­dent on the respec­tive printers.

Munich 1972

Munich 1972

Univers wasn’t accepted as read­ily as its Swiss half-​sister Hel­vetica. How­ever, it became a house­hold name to all design­ers the world over during the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. Otl Aicher and his team devel­oped an image in which Univers played a lead­ing role. Light, jolly colours and a pre­cise but flex­i­ble grid helped the type­face make a unique appearance.

Roissy signage

At that time Frutiger was already busy work­ing on the Roissy project. He had by then notched up some 20 years of expe­ri­ence in type design, and had passed from hot metal set­ting to pho­to­set­ting and early dig­i­tal meth­ods of type­set­ting. He him­self was aware of the flaws of Univers when it came to employ­ing it for sig­nage, which has dif­fer­ent needs from those of a read­ing text on paper. Even though air­ports and train sta­tions still use Univers on signs to this day, Frutiger realised back then that an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of type­face was required. He once told me in the early ’90s that Univers wasn’t suit­able for sig­nage. At the time we were look­ing for a nar­rower ver­sion of Frutiger for the Berlin trans­port system sig­nage, which didn’t yet exist in digi­tised form. So we had to digi­tise parts of the type­face our­selves, and have him give his bless­ing to a few alter­ations we had intro­duced. We also drew an italic, because the typ­i­cal Frutiger­ian slanted cut wasn’t dis­tinc­tive enough for infor­ma­tion on the Under­ground signs. Adrian would com­ment on the designs that I showed him by saying “that’s not bad, but I would have done it dif­fer­ently”; both a go-​ahead and a cri­tique in one sen­tence. For fun­da­men­tal rea­sons, he had never designed italic forms in the Roman tra­di­tion for his sans serif faces, pre­fer­ring instead to make slanted ver­sions of the upright cuts. How­ever, for the new edi­tion under the name of Frutiger Next, he let him­self be con­vinced to pro­duce a proper italic in order to meet the market demands, which looks a lot like our FF Tran­sit Kursiv from 1991.

System with feeling

I know of no other type­face designer who can put so much feel­ing into a sys­tem­atic approach. Frutiger’s type­faces are always care­fully planned, but they never look it. He devel­oped number schemes for stroke width ratios and width pro­por­tions, yet never   a priori by equa­tion or inter­po­la­tion, instead by feel for the right mea­sure­ments. None of his designs were ever made to be best­sellers or clas­sics, they were always made with the spe­cific require­ments in mind, usu­ally demanded by the employer and only occa­sion­ally due to the desire to fit a par­tic­u­lar genre. Adrian Frutiger long ago decided that he had con­tributed to every type­face clas­si­fi­ca­tion and could only repeat him­self. It’s a good job he at least let him­self be con­vinced to over­see the new edi­tions of his many clas­sics, because modern tech­nol­ogy allows all sorts of details which couldn’t be realised in his day.

Who­ever fan­cies cre­at­ing a type­face ought to know that we don’t design the black strokes, but the white spaces in between. Adrian Frutiger’s method of cut­ting shapes out of black paper using scis­sors and then stick­ing them together to make let­ters and char­ac­ters can be traced, accord­ing to him, to the tra­di­tions of his native Inter­laken. That’s what gave him the best tool – his intrin­sic feel for inner and outer shapes, for rhythm, con­trast, ten­sion and con­sis­tency, and how to trans­form all these into shapes which are more than mere alpha-​numeric characters.

What’s the best type­face in the world for the Latin alpha­bet? Frutiger, of course. It com­bines the talent of an unas­sum­ing designer who has devoted over fifty years to these little char­ac­ters with the knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of all the tech­nol­ogy that has come and gone in that time. It is appro­pri­ate that this type­face, which started out as Con­corde, bears his name today. It means he stands along­side Gara­mond, Caslon, Bodoni, Gill and the other type­face design­ers who expressed and cap­tured their epochs for posterity.

This homage is no doubt extremely embar­rass­ing for him.

Header photo © 2003 Henk Gianotten