page_title: Adrian Frutiger
section_title: The roots of letters
hierarchical_section_title: Adrian Frutiger / Career / The roots of letters
caption_attribution_description: English: Sample of the font Frutiger Stones
context_page_description: Adrian Johann Frutiger was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century. 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.
context_section_description: Linotype launched a font series named Type Before Gutenberg in 1989 and in the 1990s, Frutiger released as part of it a series of designs inspired by pre-printing alphabets, such as Herculanum and Pompeijana, inspired by Roman brush lettering, Rusticana, inspired by capitalis rustica Roman carving. He later also created Frutiger Stones (no connection to Frutiger), a playful design inspired by the shapes of pebbles. Parts of this design were finalised by Linotype's team; it was based on an alphabet drawn by Frutiger on a 1992 Christmas card. He also created Capitalis, inspired by brush lettering but without a specific historical source. Nami, an uncial design Frutiger had been considering since 1992, followed in 2007.
caption: Sample of the font Frutiger Stones
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