The graphic artist Adrian Frutiger is without exaggeration the best typeface designer of the second half of the last century. His first typeface was the Univers, for which he made the first sketches in 1951 while training as a type designer in Zurich. His latest work dates from a few years ago, when he supplemented some of his typefaces with Arabic character sets. In over sixty years, he designed more than forty complete letter families, some of which have been released in as many as more than eighty variants in boldness and widths.
Frutiger’s most successful letter was the sans serif Univers, which came in 27 different versions and was available as a hand letter, for lead-setting machines and for photo-setting systems. Peignot’s foundry briefly revived and was able to invest extra thanks to the royalty income that photo-setting machine manufacturers were only too happy to pay. Univers became the typeface that symbolised Swiss typography. In my country, the letter was used at the time by the NS, among others.
Modularity in typography
A very important aspect of the Univers family is its modularity. Frutiger wanted to create a series of related models that were absolutely harmonious with each other. This could only be achieved by determining the full range of the family as part of the design process, or by building the family within a strict modular framework. Frutiger did both.
Frutiger has continued to improve and develop the Univers family, working with Linotype designers to add new weights and expand the character set to include many languages such as Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic. The latest iteration of the family, Univers Next – a complete design update – was released in 2010.
