adrian frutiger - a prominent swiss typeface designer of the twentieth century whose career and typeface development spans the hot metal, phototypesetting, and digital typesetting eras. he is best known for creating the typeface, Univers. as a child he experimented with scripts and stylized handwriting, in a reaction against the then required cursive writing in swiss schools. at sixteen he apprenticed printer otto schaerffli for four years before moving on to study under walter käch and alfred willimann in the kunstgewerbeschule (school of applied arts) in zürich, where he focused on calligraphic experimentation. after developing many typefaces for charles peignot of deberny & peignot, a french type foundry, frutiger released Univers in 1957 and received much acclaim. from the 1970s to 1990s, frutiger spent most of his career creating variations and adaptations of fonts like Univers or his self-titled Frutiger for numerous clients that include the charles de gaulle airport and the paris metro. most recently, the swiss watchmaking company named ventura commissioned frutiger to design a watch face for a series of limited edition wristwatches. in 2009 he was inducted into the European Design Hall of Fame. some notable typefaces of frutiger include: Egyptienne, Univers, Apollo, Serifa, OCR-B, Frutiger, Avenir, Herculanum, and Linotype Didot.
Univers is notable for having 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. The Univers grid is 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. In the Linotype Univers font family, a 3-number system is used. First letter describes font weight, second letter describes font width, third letter describes position
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