
Adrian Frutiger has died - acdanger
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/master-of-the-univers_swiss-font-legend-adrian-frutiger-dies/41659284
======
davidw
It's interesting to compare typefaces of road signs across Europe. Frutiger is
pretty nice:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_\(typeface\))

I like (am used to?) the Italian one too:

[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale)
(derived from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_\(typeface\))
)

I don't much care for the Austrian/German ones though:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451)
\- apparently it was designed by committee.

~~~
pavlov
Hey, don't hate on DIN :)

For a font designed in 1931, it's impressively timeless. It doesn't seem to
communicate any particular era or emotion, so it suits almost anything
especially in digital form.

Both Google's Roboto and Apple's new San Francisco display fonts seem heavily
inspired by DIN (just IMHO of course).

~~~
derefr
> "It doesn't seem to communicate any particular era or emotion"

I'm not wholly sure about that; the strict adherence to line thickness and
limited set of curvature angles make me feel like it was adapted from the
"font" created by necessity when using road-painting equipment to write
asphalt road signs. It which lends the font a "we couldn't do better in one
case so let's at least unify on something" feeling that's slightly modernist,
similar to logos from the 70s that use unnecessary all-caps to look "digital"
because they work with green-screens that don't display lower-case.

~~~
theoh
I can't give you chapter and verse on this, but when the first autobahns were
built, they were composed of straight sections and constant curvature bends.
This was perceived by engineers to be the rational way. Landscape designers
(who were also involved) eventually convinced the engineers to adopt more
sinuous curves, which of course also create transitions (clothoid or Cornu
spiral sections) which made the roads easier to drive on.

~~~
theoh
Found a reference: Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn.
p.130 onwards.

~~~
gpvos
[https://books.google.nl/books?id=Kq_Ys4BlA6cC&lpg=PP1&hl=nl&...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=Kq_Ys4BlA6cC&lpg=PP1&hl=nl&pg=PA129#v=onepage&q&f=false)
(starts on p. 129 really)

------
pavlov
The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is
probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more
familiar with Avenir.

Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages,
among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the
2010s zeitgeist).

Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir:

[http://www.notion.so](http://www.notion.so)

RIP Mr Frutiger, who perhaps did more for sans serif than anyone else since
Eric Gill.

~~~
dublinben
> [http://www.notion.so/](http://www.notion.so/)

I love more than anything else, sites that treat me as a second-class citizen
for using a non-proprietary browser. They must have so many users already,
that they don't mind alienating a large portion of their audience.

~~~
542458
> treat me as a second-class citizen

I think you're being a little excessively hyperbolic. They don't support your
browser yet and state as much - that's hardly malicious or demeaning to you.
They also promise support is coming soon. It's a very early phase product that
uses a lot of newer and less universal APIs. It's not that they have so many
users that they don't care - rather, it's that they're still beta testing and
haven't been able to devote the resources yet. I really fail to see the
problem here.

~~~
barrkel
You only get one chance to make a first impression, etc.

I have a similar antipathy for Quora for requiring facebook logins to view
their content (not actually theirs, their users' content) that came up during
search results.

I believe they've now dropped the facebook login requirement, and I think they
now show a lot of content from organic search traffic, but I plan on ignoring
them anyway for as long as possible.

~~~
542458
Oh, I don't disagree that the specific method followed by this site is
garbage. I just felt that the comment I was replying to was overanalyzing the
motives behind a relatively innocuous (if poorly thought out) piece of
content.

------
e15ctr0n
Frutiger's personality and work are sensitively depicted in two documentaries
that are worth watching: "Adrian Frutiger - Typographer" (1999) [0] and "The
Man of Black and White: Adrian Frutiger" (2005) [1].

"Just My Type", Simon Garfield's wildly popular book on typefaces, has a
chapter titled "What is it about the Swiss?" which has a whole section
dedicated to Frutiger. [2]

Frutiger's design philosophy is beautifully reflected in this quote: "If you
remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The
spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to
take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to
feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful."

Edit: Frutiger did a very detailed interview during the 1998 ATypI conference
that was published in the graphic design journal, Eye, in 1999 [3]. Long read,
but worth it to understand the man and his work.

Linotype has published an excellent obituary [4].

"Adrian Frutiger Typefaces: The Complete Works" is available on amazon.com [5]
and amazon.co.uk [6]. A sneak peak is on ISSUU [7].

[0]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426872/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426872/)

[1]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0934510/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0934510/)

[2] [http://www.betterworldbooks.com/just-my-type-
id-1592407463.a...](http://www.betterworldbooks.com/just-my-type-
id-1592407463.aspx)

[3] [http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-
adria...](http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-adrian-
frutiger)

[4]
[http://www.linotype.com/720-34866/adrianfrutigerremembered.h...](http://www.linotype.com/720-34866/adrianfrutigerremembered.html)

[5]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3038215260/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3038215260/)

[6]
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/3038215260/](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/3038215260/)

[7] [http://issuu.com/birkhauser.ch/docs/adrian-frutiger-
typeface...](http://issuu.com/birkhauser.ch/docs/adrian-frutiger-typefaces)

~~~
MrJagil
Do you know where to find them? Preferably free, if they're on an archive
somewhere or similar. They seem to be in german as well, am I correct in this?

~~~
e15ctr0n
"Adrian Frutiger - Typographer" (1999) was released in English, French, German
and Italian. It was released in DVD format in 2004. It's listed on amazon.de
[0] but seems to be out of stock at the moment. It seems to be available in
libraries across Germany and Switzerland [1].

"The Man of Black and White: Adrian Frutiger" (2005) was released in Swiss
German and German in DVD format. It's also listed on amazon.de [2] but seems
to be out of stock at the moment. The San Francisco Public Library [3] seems
to have a copy though.

Sebastian Rohner of R.Films shot an interview with Adrian Frutiger at his home
in Switzerland in 2007. It's available in German on YouTube [4].

[0] [http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-
Schriftengestalter/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-
Schriftengestalter/dp/B0007W9DPE)

[1] [https://www.worldcat.org/title/adrian-frutiger-
schriftengest...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/adrian-frutiger-
schriftengestalter-ein-portrat/oclc/315110710/editions)

[2] [http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-Mann-Schwarz-
Weiss/dp/3...](http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-Mann-Schwarz-
Weiss/dp/3722500494/)

[3] [https://www.worldcat.org/title/mann-von-schwarz-und-weiss-
ad...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/mann-von-schwarz-und-weiss-adrian-
frutiger/oclc/308433836)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipGFasprntg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipGFasprntg)

~~~
MrJagil
Thank you for being so thorough and informative though I seemingly won't get
hold of these films. After reading the comment thread in the "playing with
pigs" article, this is a ray of sunshine.

------
irl_zebra
The article states that some of his fonts are highly legible at distances and
thus used for some road signs. I'm curious, is there an objective way to
determine whether one font is more legible than another, or is it purely
subjective? Obviously some fonts are clearly more legible than others, but
between the "legible fonts," can one say objectively that one is more legible
than another? Can a computer create a font that is the "most" objectively
legible?

~~~
manachar
It can, and is objectively measured and tested.

Here is a great article in the NY Times magazine about the creation of a new
font, Clearview, for highway signage:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

------
quink
Gill Sans and Zapf's Optima were the first big humanist fonts, but they are
really best used sparsely. Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

But with Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger the whole world was blown open. Helvetica
had a predecessor fairly like it in Akzidenz Grotesk, but Frutiger was
something else entirely. Grotesques had been around for decades prior to
Helvetica. Frutiger was a revolution. I and everybody should know that our
visual world is markedly different because of Adrian Frutiger.

Right now, I am on a Windows tablet. Segoe UI, Tahoma, Arial, Verdana,
Calibri, Microsoft's (and Matthew Carter's in particular) font efforts here
were, but for Arial, so very much direct descendants, if not copies, of
Frutiger's Frutiger. The default font in Microsoft Word must count Frutiger as
it's most influential ancestor, bar none.

On Mac OS X, Lucida Sans is just the same, carrying Frutiger's DNA utterly.
And on Linux, Bitstream Vera is just the same.

And it's not just Frutiger. Mac OS X's new default font, San Francisco is very
much Univers, with some DIN. Univers is the designer's default font of choice
for anywhere that Helvetica isn't chosen. I love its condensed form, as used
here by Australia Post, and its numbering system was influential too and
expressed an incredible range of variation within a single family. It is the
ultimate tight font.

Avenir was a wonderful reinterpretation of Futura, Serifa is the most sensible
slab serif, and the only generally acceptable one next to Rockwell... and
that's nothing to say of the cross-pollination of his Frutiger with Univers
and Helvetica. Think Roboto and basically half of what's on Google Fonts.

His influence on Erik Spiekermann, who drew some fonts that blew the visual
landscape open in the 90s and early 2000s is insane when combined with the
dutch Thesis and Scala. His influence on every fixed width font that has
become popular on computers after Courier New is similarly huge.

Adrian Frutiger is, with no doubt, the person that drew our languages the most
in the past century, Akzidenz Grotesk coming from 1896. His shapes influenced
every comment you read here more than any other person in the past century. He
made things legible and beautiful. Even for computers he did, with OCR-B.

I think that now with us in a post-Frutiger era, it's going to take a very,
very long while for someone to come along and change our written language and
visual world with such a bombshell as he did. If ever again - that is a very
serious question.

We are now entering an area where there's fewer new ideas, but refinement and
cross-pollination. The landscape seems like it's settling, with typefaces like
Gotham and San Francisco and Roboto being very evolutionary... but with not
that much of a way forward? There's been few new strands of DNA in the
typeface world since Spiekermann's Meta. (and its very contemporary siblings
Thesis and Scala)

Let's hope that like the Dalai Lama, we can find Frutiger reincarnated in a
new form so that in a few decades he may once again shine us a light and bring
to us a genuine future, like his Frutiger had brought upon us before.

Either that or we just A-B test signage typefaces out the wazoo and see if
something as amazing as that somehow emerges a million generations from now,
possibly even within the confines of the Latin alphabet. DIN 1451, which had
some influence an Frutiger, isn't spent yet, I don't think. Meta probably is
spent by now. Gill Sans is getting close, because of Gotham. Frutiger is
getting there :/

We now live in a post-Frutiger world. That's kind of scary, if you think about
it.

Whatever comes, I hope to at least see the next Frutiger's work and what it
means for mankind before I die. I expect it to be interesting.

~~~
amyjess
> Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

Somehow, I missed that news.

Damn, the world of typography lost two of its biggest visionaries this summer
alone.

I always preferred Zapf's fonts to Frutiger's by a wide margin (I always favor
serif fonts over sans serifs), but they were both brilliant men, and
typography won't be the same without either.

~~~
e15ctr0n
>> Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

> Somehow, I missed that news.

I did submit the news to HN, but it received no attention, alas.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692624)

------
th0ma5
I'm curious about the comment in the caption of the portrait in this story,
specifically that harmonious typefaces are only achievable by hand. Anyone
have any more details about this? Hopefully there are many aspects of design
that are still solely within the realm of people, but this may be slightly
shrinking every day.

~~~
542458
To clarify, I believe that his stance was that while digital reproductions of
a finished font are satisfactory, the creative process and the original design
of a typeface must always be done by hand. You can see some of his hand-drawn
works here, on the Zurich University of the Arts' website:

[http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asimages/search@?criteria...](http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asimages/search@?criteria=frutiger&rg=Objects,,0&sm=\[Objects,%20Exhibitions,%20Sites,%20People,%20MediaModule\])

Here are some particularly interesting ones:

[http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/52/title-a...](http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/52/title-
asc?criteria=frutiger&rg=Objects,,0&sm=\[Objects,%20Exhibitions,%20Sites,%20People,%20MediaModule\])

[http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/65/title-a...](http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/65/title-
asc?criteria=frutiger&rg=Objects,,0&sm=\[Objects,%20Exhibitions,%20Sites,%20People,%20MediaModule\])

[http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/114/title-...](http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/114/title-
asc?criteria=frutiger&rg=Objects,,0&sm=\[Objects,%20Exhibitions,%20Sites,%20People,%20MediaModule\])

------
mark-r
First Hermann Zapf in June, now Adrian Frutiger. As a font geek, I am
mourning.

------
amelius
Any links to the design philosophy behind the Frutiger font?

~~~
theoh
If Wikipedia doesn't satisfy you, maybe try the "complete works" book.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_\(typeface\))

------
BorisMelnik
very sad to hear - he at least achieved the status where people all over the
world are going to miss and remember him

~~~
hobo_mark
Exactly, and yet people look at me weird when I express that being remembered
is a worthy pursuit of one's existence, and that the enjoyment of solitary
creation is comparable to that of hanging out having some more socially
accepted form of 'fun'</rant>

~~~
jazzyk
Yes, assuming it is being remembered for something other humans appreciate and
are grateful for (as is the case here).

------
chrisjlee
I wonder what font will be on his epitaph.

