Though everyone thought he would want to use his successful Univers font family, Frutiger decided instead to make a new sans serif typeface that would be suitable for the specific legibility requirements of airport signage: easy recognition from the distances and angles of driving and walking.
![]() ![]() Such distinctness makes it good for signage and display work. Frutiger Font Adobe Full Family HasAlthough it was originally intended for the large scale of an airport, the full family has a warmth and subtlety that have, in recent years, made it popular for the smaller scale of body text in magazines and booklets. The family has 14 weights and 14 companion fonts with Central European characters and accents. See also the new revised version Frutiger Next from the Linotype Platinum Collection. Cyrillic letters had not been produced until Frutiger Next W1G. A very popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as the best general typeface ever. A consistent feature of Frutiger is wide-open apertures between strokes, in contrast to the more folded-up design of Univers. Univers-like M, square and with centre strokes descending to the base of the letter. Some versions not drawn by Frutiger do add a true italic (see Frutiger Next below). In practice the design was drawn by his colleague (and fellow Swiss in Paris) Andr Grtler as Frutiger was busy. Frutiger wrote of it: I felt I was on the right track with this grotesque; it was a truly novel typeface. Grtler too wrote of feeling that the design was innovative: this style didnt exist in grotesques at the time, except for Gill Sans. Despite Frutiger and Grtlers enthusiasm, the design failed to sell well and was discontinued with the end of the metal type period: Frutiger wrote that Linotype, who bought Sofratype, werent aware of the fact that with Concorde they had a totally up-to-date typeface. Frutiger had earlier created an alphabet inspired by Univers and Peignot for Paris Orly Airport, but found the experience a failure due to lack of control and the insistence that all text be in capitals only. As a result, he proposed a modified version of Concorde, refining it following research into legibility. The Roissy typeface was completed in 1972. Impressed by the quality of the Roissy airport signage, the typographical director of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company approached Frutiger in 1974 to turn it into a typeface for print. According to Frutiger, What was important, was total clarity I would even call it nudity an absence of any kind of artistic addition. Designing Frutiger as a print version of Roissy, this principle resulted in a distinctive and legible typeface. Ascenders and descenders are very prominent, and apertures are wide to easily distinguish letters from one another. Improvements on Roissy included better spacing. Frutiger became extremely popular for uses such as corporate and transportation branding. In 2008 it was the fifth best-selling typeface of the Linotype foundry. It does not include OpenType features or kerning, but it adds support to Latin Extended-B and Greek characters, with Frutiger 55 supporting extra IPA characters and spacing modifier letters. Unlike most Frutiger variants, Frutiger Linotype features old-style figures as the default numeral style. The new version, Frutiger Next, changed a number of details and added a true italic style in place of the oblique roman of the original. The family include six font weights, with a bonus Ultra Light weight in the OpenType version. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, and Latin Extended characters. OpenType features include small caps, old style figures, superscript and subscript, ordinals, proportional lining figures, and case forms. Font names are no longer numbered with the Frutiger system. Frutiger Black was renamed to Frutiger Next Heavy, and Frutiger Ultra Black was changed to Frutiger Next Black. In addition to italic type, characters such as the cent sign (), the copyright symbol (), the ampersand (), the at sign (), the sharp S ( ), Omega (), and the integral symbol () were redesigned.
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