The internationally renowned Bernese designer who created the famous Univers typeface passed away on September 12 in Bern at the age of 87.
He was one of the few typographers whose worked with hot metal, photographic and digital typesetting during his long career. Besides his well-known Univers family of sans serif typefaces, Frutiger designed over 50 other fonts like Roissy, Avenir, Centennial, Egyptienne, Glyphia, Seifa and Versailles. He was also the man behind OCR-B, the standard alphabet for optical character recognition.
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Univers was one of the first breakthroughs of the new system of phototypesetting that soon supplanted the old and expensive method of casting a font in lead. It offered a whole set of variations to the blossoming global advertising industry which helped make it enormously popular. He did well from the advertising boom by creating his own studio in 1960 and working for clients such as Air France, IBM and the Swiss Post.