Adrian Frutiger is a leading typeface designer of the twentieth century who has created some of the most recognized typefaces used today (over one hundred and seventy). He was born in 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland, and studied graphic design and sculpture at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. His father and his teachers discouraged his early love of sculpture; they wanted him to work in printing. He maintains his love of sculpture in the printing world, and this has influenced many of his type forms. After school, he moved to Paris and began work at the Deberny & Peignot type foundry where he helped transition traditional typefaces from printing methods to newer “phototypesetting technologies”. Eventually, Frutiger and two colleagues founded an independent graphic design studio, where he worked as a freelance designer and typographer. At this time, Frutiger also began to work on his own typefaces, a few of which are prominent today. These typefaces include Universe, Serifa, Herculanum, Vectora, and Frutiger. Frutiger is a typeface that is regarded as being very easy to read, and because of that, it is used on motorway signs in France and Switzerland. Adrian taught typography and illustration for many years at the Ecole Estinne in Paris. In 2003, the Swiss watch company Ventura commissioned him to create a new watch face for a line of watches.




Universe is a type family consists of 44 faces, with 16 uniquely numbered weight, width, position combinations. 20 fonts have oblique positions. 8 fonts support Central European character set. 8 support Cyrillic character set. Frutiger designed a unique classification system to eliminate naming and specifying confusion. The number used in a font is a concatenation of two numbers. The first set defines weight, while the second defines width and position.