Adrian Frutiger (May 24, 1928 – September 10, 2015) was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of digital typography 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.
Early life
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 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.