Adrian Frutiger who passed away September 10, 2015 was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of digital typography in the second half of the 20th Century and into the 21st. His career spanned the hot metal, photosetting and digital typesetting eras.

 

Frutiger’s most famous designs include Univers, Frutiger and Avenir, are landmark sans-serif families spanning the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, hamanist and geometric. Univers was noteable 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 descirbed creating sans-serifs types as his ‘main life’s work’.

 

My publication consists of three booklets, the first one as the introduction and background of Adrian Frutigers life, the second booklet as the introduction to the Univers and the third book being a type specimen book on how to use the Univers as a whole.  The three books are different sizes and colours which is a metaphor for the layers in the Earth and as one read on into the booklets they can expeirence as if they are learing the life story of Adrian Frutiger.

 

The three booklets play homage to Adrian and as one reads into the layers of his life and history.  The main theme of the booklet is on the typeface Univers – The life of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers.  A Life's Work and my aim was to communicate Frutiger's life, work and other historical events that contextualised this.

 

The outer space concept was applied to sections to explore the following: History in space to describe families and styles of the typeface; our solar system and its planets to describe type weights and sizes;  different paragraph alignment and width variations.