Love letter to Adrian Frutiger

Most of us think there are only two typefaces in this world: Times, the one that looks old fashioned, and Arial, the modern one. If you are on a Mac Helvetica will probably have Arial. All the other fonts on the computer are irrelevant. And yes, me too I was like that until I dipped deeper into the matter.
Today there are thousands of different fonts on any machine so most people drop the matter and just stick to Arial or Times. It is just like watching satellite TV. It is no fun so you go back to the two channels you already know. But not me…

I remember very well the day many years ago when I was walking around Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and there it was, it hit me:  Those signs. This was graphic design at its best, putting order into chaos, clean and clear, leading multi cultured crowds towards their destinations. Pictograms that need no words and a modern typeface that looked so modern but subtle. Totally essential ! Zen ! 

"What typeface is this ?"

I thought.

Years later I found out that this was UNIVERS. I also discovered that there was a reworked, updated typeface based upon this font called FRUTIGER. And Frutiger is his father´s name.

by CANM605, Picassa

Adrian Frutiger, born 1928 close to Interlaken, still alive and kicking, is little known outside the neighborhood of graphic and type design. Most have never even heard his name. Interestingly there is hardly anyone on the planet that has NOT been exposed to his work ! In his life he designed over 50 typefaces with Univers, Frutiger and the machine readable OCR font standing out. He is a living monument ! A great artist ! Frutiger is the guru of type design. 

So what makes his typefaces so special ? What is Frutiger´s magic ? What does his typefaces have that other typefaces don´t ?

"From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader," 


said he. And yes, it is true, unlike fashionable typefaces that stand out, Frutigers fonts are very subtle. They never grow old, they are invisible but are highly readable.
At the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich he was a pupil of Walter Käch who was obsessed about perfection in type design. He sent his students into the historic museum to copy roman inscriptions that are the basis of todays "Times Roman" and taught them to look at type with special care. This has been the foundation from where Frutiger ventured out.

Frutiger approaches type design with an emphasis on contrast. "For me, the black-and-white 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."

When modern typesetting replaced the cast type that had existed ever since Gutenberg, Frutiger was one of the first to design type for this new technology.

"For normal text faces in particular, the weight of the downstroke is a very important factor in determining the basic structure of a typeface. A kind of standard for this stroke weight already existed in the Carolingian minuscule and became fully established with the first humanistic romans. It is a quite specific ratio of black to white which gives the x-height band of a typeset line a grey value which the reader finds to be "normal". 
These proportions are perceived with astonishing sensitivity. It often happened that a type foundry had to supplement an existing typeface with a "Book", "Medium" or "Heavy" version, which would be accepted in text setting as "normal" or "suitable for reading". It is not easy to quantify these standard values. The black value is influenced by the weight of the horizontals, also the serifs in the case of roman faces"

So what is his secret ? What is his secret ingredient ? Well, ladies and gentlemen, here it is:

"As an average value, it may be taken that the stroke thickness is multiplied by about 5.5 times in the x-height. The normal width of a sans serif face consists approximately of a side bearing of 3 stroke thicknesses and a lateral "beard" of one stroke thickness. If, to balance out the black value of the horizontal, 0.5 stroke thickness is subtracted from the x-height, the result is a theoretical x-height band of 5 stroke thicknesses. The grey value is composed of 2/7 surface coverage and 5/7 white space, corresponding to a density of rather less than 30 per cent."

Thank you, Mr Frutiger, for revealing us your secret ! You are the man !