Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928. He was a very active child that experimented with scripts and stylized handwriting. He had a very early interest in sculpture and was discouraged by his father and secondary teachers. They encouraged him to work in print, yet his true interest was sculpture. He studied under Walter Kach and Alfred Willimann in the Kunstgewerbeschule School of applied arts between the years of 1949 and 1951. He later grew up to be a Swiss typographer, which he accepted a position at Deberny and Peignot. He began work and immediately started on a number of new typefaces, which included Univers. Univers was released in 1957; Frutiger attempted to categorize type. He saw a common problem that bold, extended, and etc. type that never meant the same thing from typographer to typographer. So that’s when Frutiger released Univers. In the pursuit of a new more logical system, Adrian used a color-coded diagram that displayed numbered weights on the vertical axis and had different widths. This design was used as a visual tool that illustrated the different variants in relationship to each other.

Sources:

Graphic Design: A New History Stephen Eskilson pg 207

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Frutiger

http://typophile.com/node/12118