Adrian Frutiger was destined for typographical greatness well before his entrance into the world of commercial typeface production. Very creative from an early age, Frutiger dabbled in sculpture and type design, in particular, alternatives to the stiff, formal cursive taught at his native Swiss schools.
Arguably, Frutiger’s most famous font, the Univers® family, was produced as a reaction to Paul Renner’s 1927 Futura® typeface. Frutiger did not feel comfortable with the manner in which Futura sat upon the page, feeling it was too disciplined. Preferring a more humanist approach to typeface creation, he persuaded his then-employer Charles Peignot to allow him to create a new face based on different criteria.
Various other fonts followed after the Univers creation including Serifa®, Glypha® and the self titled Frutiger®.
The Avenir (French for “future”) font was produced as another real alternative to the Futura design and the original face was available in three weights with accompanying italic variants. This limited variety led to the reworking of the type in the early twenty-first century by Frutiger and Kobayashi. The Avenir Next design was subsequently released in twenty-four different styles including Regular, Italic, Condensed and Condensed Italic variants and published by Linotype in 2004. Legible and eminently flexible, designers the world over have embraced the Avenir Next face for a wide variety of different projects.
