Introduction
Many typeface catalogs, including our own, group all serif typefaces together under one umbrella-category. But in truth, there are many different kinds of serifs, e.g., Renaissance serifs, baroque serifs, unbracketed modern serifs, Latin serifs, wedge serifs, etc. One of the most popular styles of seriffed letter, especially for display type, remains the slab serif.
The slab serif is a genre of letterforms that has been in use for almost 200 years. Throughout this time, many
[...]Adrian Frutiger has spent decades working very closely with Linotype. In the many years of this fruitful collaboration, we’ve accumulated a number of photographs of Adrian Frutiger. These images show glimpses of the different periods and highlights of his life so far, including pictures of him working in his studio, moments of him along with his typefaces, and even more recent shots of him working together with Akira Kobayashi.
We hope that you enjoy browsing through these images.
Frutiger® – the sans serif classic.
Get the original from Linotype as single fonts, in a Value Pack, or on CD.
About Frutiger
Famous type designer Adrian Frutiger created a masterpiece with this typeface. Faced with the challenge of designing an exceptionally legible type for the signs of the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, he developed the now legendary Frutiger in 1968. The original Linotype typeface has since been expanded to include 14 weights and is of course not just
[...]Über die Lesbarkeit
Unter dem Einfluss der verschieden Druckverfahren hat die lateinische Textschrift subtile Formveränderungen erfahren. Grundsätzlich neue Formen sind jedoch keine entstanden. Als Demonstration dafür sind acht a in den meistgelesenen Schriftstilen mit einem Drehraster versehen und übereinander kopiert. Das Resultat zeigt eine erstaunliche Übereinstimmung.
Portrait
We can read because we perceive elements and forms which are familiar to us. So in order to even recognize words, we must first decipher the elements which make up the shapes of the letters – a process which involves the interplay of myriad aspects. To a certain degree, many of us are aware of these aspects. Yet Adrian Frutiger knows about such shifting dynamics in perception in a way no other person can, as he has been instrumental in researching the subject and over several decades
[...]OCR™
OCR A and OCR B are standardized, monospaced fonts designed for "Optical Character Recognition" on electronic devices. OCR A was developed to meet the standards set by the American National Standards Institute in 1966 for the processing of documents by banks, credit card companies and similar businesses. This font was intended to be "read" by scanning devices, and not necessarily by humans. However, because of its "techno" look, it has been re-discovered for advertising and display
[...]
The Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger developed Serifa® in 1964, and it was released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1967. He based the shapes in Serifa on those in
Univers, the sans serif family he designed in the 1950s. While Serifa retains the geometric, linear skeletons of Univers, it has the addition of unbracketed square serifs, a squatter x-height, and boxier caps. Because of these characteristics, Serifa is a true representative of the slab serif (or Egyptian) style. Slab serifs designs first emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century and have had a couple popular revivals in the twentieth century. Serifa is surprisingly elegant and legible, and with its six weights, it functions well in both text and display typography. See also
Glypha, which is a condensed version of Serifa.
