Adrian Frutiger (May 24, 1928 – September 10, 2015) was a Swiss typeface designer.
He influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. His career spanned the hot metal, phototypesetting and digital typesetting eras. Until his death, he lived in Bremgarten bei Bern.
Frutiger’s most famous designs, Univers, Frutiger and Avenir, are landmark sans-serif families spanning the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, humanist and geometric. Univers was notable for being one of the first sans-serif faces to form a consistent but wide-ranging family, across a range of widths and weights. Frutiger described creating sans-serif types as his “main life’s work,” partially due to the difficulty in designing them compared to serif fonts.
