On the death of the great Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger.
Although we have never personally worked with Adrian Frutiger, his typeface Avenir has left its mark on Prodir’s corporate design. On 12 September, the great Swiss typeface designer died in Bremgarten near Bern. He was 87 years old.
Frutiger’s fonts are known to us all; his name, on the other hand, is only known to a few: Frutiger was the originator of Univers, the sans-serif typeface, which was chosen by Otl Aicher for the visual identity of the Olympic Games in Munich. Frutiger’s optimized OCR-B for machine readability was elevated in 1973 to an ISO standard and, to this day, finds global use on all credit cards. In Switzerland, his typefaces are omnipresent. The typeface Astra-Frutiger plays a pivotal role in the design of Swiss street signs. And the corporate design for Swiss Post is also a product of Frutiger’s creativity.
Photo credits: Adrian Frutiger’s portrait by Henk W. Gianotten