Adrian Frutiger has died
swissinfo.ch
Adrian Frutiger has died
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Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#2I'm curious about the comment in the caption of the portrait in this story, specifically that harmonious typefaces are only achievable by hand. Anyone have any more details about this? Hopefully there are many aspects of design that are still solely within the realm of people, but this may be slightly shrinking every day.
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#3The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more familiar with Avenir.
Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages, among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the 2010s zeitgeist).
Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir:
RIP Mr Frutiger, who perhaps did more for sans serif than anyone else since Eric Gill.
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#4The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more familiar with Avenir. Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages, among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the 2010s zeitgeist). Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir: http://…
> http://www.notion.so/
I love more than anything else, sites that treat me as a second-class citizen for using a non-proprietary browser. They must have so many users already, that they don't mind alienating a large portion of their audience.
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#5The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more familiar with Avenir. Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages, among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the 2010s zeitgeist). Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir: http://…
> http://www.notion.so/ I love more than anything else, sites that treat me as a second-class citizen for using a non-proprietary browser. They must have so many users already, that they don't mind alienating a large portion of their audience.
> treat me as a second-class citizen
I think you're being a little excessively hyperbolic. They don't support your browser yet and state as much - that's hardly malicious or demeaning to you. They also promise support is coming soon. It's a very early phase product that uses a lot of newer and less universal APIs. It's not that they have so many users that they don't care - rather, it's that they're still beta testing and haven't been able to devote the resources yet. I really fail to see the problem here.
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#6The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more familiar with Avenir. Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages, among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the 2010s zeitgeist). Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir: http://…
> http://www.notion.so/ I love more than anything else, sites that treat me as a second-class citizen for using a non-proprietary browser. They must have so many users already, that they don't mind alienating a large portion of their audience.
It's very short-sighted (even arrogant?) on the developer's part to assume that someone will switch to a different browser just for their site.
And it's not just non-proprietary browsers, it's just any browser not cherry picked by the developer, which for some inexplicable reason includes the iPhone but not Firefox, Edge or Opera.
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#7I'm curious about the comment in the caption of the portrait in this story, specifically that harmonious typefaces are only achievable by hand. Anyone have any more details about this? Hopefully there are many aspects of design that are still solely within the realm of people, but this may be slightly shrinking every day.
To clarify, I believe that his stance was that while digital reproductions of a finished font are satisfactory, the creative process and the original design of a typeface must always be done by hand. You can see some of his hand-drawn works here, on the Zurich University of the Arts' website:
http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asimages/search@?criteria...
Here are some particularly interesting ones:
http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/52/title-a...
http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/65/title-a...
http://www.emuseum.ch/view/objects/asitem/search@/114/title-...
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#8The article mentions Univers as his best known typeface. Although that is probably true historically, I think many HN readers would be much more familiar with Avenir. Avenir ships with OS X and iOS, and is widely used for startup landing pages, among a million other things (Avenir seems to be somehow very close to the 2010s zeitgeist). Posted yesterday was this beautiful product site, of course set in Avenir: http://…
> http://www.notion.so/ I love more than anything else, sites that treat me as a second-class citizen for using a non-proprietary browser. They must have so many users already, that they don't mind alienating a large portion of their audience.
To add insult to injury, it also seems to work fine (though I didn't compare to Chrome) if you override the user agent.
edit: I didn't actually try to sign up for early access.. it's completely possible that that portion of the site doesn't work in Firefox, but there's no reason to block users from even seeing what it's about...
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#9Frutiger's personality and work are sensitively depicted in two documentaries that are worth watching: "Adrian Frutiger - Typographer" (1999) [0] and "The Man of Black and White: Adrian Frutiger" (2005) [1].
"Just My Type", Simon Garfield's wildly popular book on typefaces, has a chapter titled "What is it about the Swiss?" which has a whole section dedicated to Frutiger. [2]
Frutiger's design philosophy is beautifully reflected in this quote: "If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful."
Edit: Frutiger did a very detailed interview during the 1998 ATypI conference that was published in the graphic design journal, Eye, in 1999 [3]. Long read, but worth it to understand the man and his work.
Linotype has published an excellent obituary [4].
"Adrian Frutiger Typefaces: The Complete Works" is available on amazon.com [5] and amazon.co.uk [6]. A sneak peak is on ISSUU [7].
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426872/
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0934510/
[2] http://www.betterworldbooks.com/just-my-type-id-1592407463.a...
[3] http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-adria...
[4] http://www.linotype.com/720-34866/adrianfrutigerremembered.h...
[5] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3038215260/
[6] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/3038215260/
[7] http://issuu.com/birkhauser.ch/docs/adrian-frutiger-typeface...
Re: Adrian Frutiger has died
#10It's interesting to compare typefaces of road signs across Europe. Frutiger is pretty nice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface)
I like (am used to?) the Italian one too:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_Normale (derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface) )
I don't much care for the Austrian/German ones though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 - apparently it was designed by committee.