Adrian Frutiger is a well-known type-designer of the
twentieth century. He was born in 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland. He began his
excursion to design by working as a printer’s apprentice at the early age of
sixteen. He studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts and furthered his
career at the Deberny & Peignot typefoundry (Graphic Design Referenced 219). He was very interested in
calligraphic lettering and it appeared so in his designed typefaces. According
to Graphic Design Referenced,
Adrian Frutiger designed a number of broadly used typefaces,
among them Serifa (1967), Frutiger (1955), and Avenir (1988) (219). The
typefoundry allowed Frutiger to produce metal type and fonts for
phototypesetting systems. Many of his typefaces can be found as logos,
corporate identities, and corporate typefaces.
Early in technology, OCR-A was one of the first optical
recognition typefaces that the public accepted. It was easy to read by a
machine, however, it was harder to read by the human eye. Therefore, Adrian
Frutiger designed a monospace font known as OCR-B. Developed in 1968 to smooth
the progress of the optical character recognitions, it was accepted as the
world standard in 1973 and made easier for the human eye to read compared to
OCR-A.
From the initial progress of digital typography, Adrian
Frutiger’s typefaces continue to lead the way for the designers in the 21st
century.
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