Swiss Foundation Type and Typography

Heidrun Osterer

Philipp Stamm

The international creation of typefaces after 1950 was decisively influenced by the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger. His Univers typeface and the machine-readable font OCR-B, which was adopted as an ISO standard, are milestones, as is his type for the Paris airports, which set new standards for signage types and evolved into the Frutiger typeface. With his corporate types, he helped to define the public profiles of companies such as the Japanese Shiseido line of cosmetics. In all he created some fifty types, including Ondine, Méridien, Avenir, and Vectora. Based on conversations with Frutiger himself and on extensive research in France, England, Germany, and Switzerland, this publication provides a highly detailed and accurate account of the type designer’s artistic development. For the first time, all of his types – from the design phase to the marketing stage – are illustrated and analyzed with reference to the technology and related types. Hitherto unpublished types that were never realized and more than one hundred logos complete the picture.

Swiss Foundation Type and Typography

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