Fonts for metal and early pho­to­type­set­ting machines like the Lino­type and Mono­type had to be cre­ated within a crude sys­tem of pre­de­ter­mined char­ac­ter width val­ues. Every let­ter had to fit within, and have its spa­cing determ­ined by, a grid of only 18 units. This meant that if the ideal pro­por­tions of a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter did not fit within a sub­set of these 18 units, it had to be altered so that it did. [End of Lead-in] As a res­ult, type design­ers were often com­pelled to com­prom­ise their designs from what they felt was ideal so they would work within the con­fines of the technology.

The ori­ginal Fru­ti­ger™ typeface was such a design. The face dates back to 1968, when Adrian Fru­ti­ger was com­mis­sioned to design the sig­nage for the then-new Charles de Gaulle Air­port in Roissy, France. Frutiger’s goal was to cre­ate a sans serif typeface with the ration­al­ity and clean lines of his Univers design, but softened with organic, almost cal­li­graphic, nuances.

The Fru­ti­ger sig­nage was com­pleted and installed at de Gaulle air­port in 1975. It took two more years to con­vert it into fonts for pho­to­type­set­ting. In the pro­cess, Fru­ti­ger was forced to make changes to many char­ac­ters to accom­mod­ate the spa­cing lim­it­a­tions of early pho­to­type­set­ting technology.

Neue Fru­ti­ger™, drawn as a col­lab­or­a­tion between Adrian Fru­ti­ger and Lino­type type dir­ector Akira Kobay­ashi, is based on the ori­ginal Fru­ti­ger typeface, but incor­por­ates many changes. The most obvi­ous is an increase in the family’s range of weights. Neue Fru­ti­ger has ten roman weights – each with an italic coun­ter­part. Other, more subtle, improve­ments were also made. Because the new design is not bound by the design restric­tions put on the first Fru­ti­ger, Neue Fru­ti­ger improves on the ori­ginal design in import­ant areas, such as char­ac­ter design and spa­cing. Kobay­ashi and Fru­ti­ger also con­cen­trated on enhan­cing char­ac­ter legib­il­ity at small sizes. Neue Fru­ti­ger enjoys all the design and spa­cing refine­ments that cur­rent digital tech­no­logy can provide.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Type for Print.