Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger is a Swiss illustrator and typographer. He has worked for design firms and done freelance work, however, he is most noted for his creation of the Universe typeface. Universe was created in attempt to design a typeface that could be universally used. With these intentions, Frutiger wanted the caracters to be clean and concise so that the eye would not get lost in busy serifs or embellishments. As a result, the san-serif, Universe font was made. The typeface has become one of the most broadly used standard typefaces. It has been utilized world wide in public transportation venues and other many other locations. Nevertheless, Universe is most unique for its classification system, known as the Frutiger grid. The grid is a system which is used to identify and organize fonts within a typeface by assigning them to numbers. Each font is assigned two digits. The first digit refers to the fonts weight. The second, indicates both the face width of the font and whether it is roman or oblique. The Universe font was the first font to use this system, possibly because there were 21 variants of the original font. Regardless, many fonts today are still referred to by their numerical assignment according to the grid.