Balancing black and white, developing a universal language, and deconstructing what made Adrian Frutiger the designer’s designer
Around 1971, a group of uniquely and eccentrically talented individuals were invited by Paul Andreu, a dynamic architect and engineer, to brain-storm design ideas for an airport under construction. This airport, to be one of world’s largest at the time, was being built in a French town called Roissy, located on the outskirts of Paris (today, we know the airport as the Charles de Gaulle). Andreu’s invitees formed an architectural study group comprising interior architects, colour specialists, philosophers, a musician and a typographer. Wine was swilled. It can be assumed that black turtlenecks were worn and Gauloises smoked, too. Ideas such as laying a pasture for sheep to graze near the runway were tried on for size. There were philosophical musings about the nature of take-off and the separation from Mother Earth for the human consciousness. One idea that came out those evenings was a musical note titled “Indicatif Roissy”. It was composed by Bernard Parmegiani and was used (until it was retired in 2005) to denote the beginning of an announcement over the PA system.
The typographer attending those stimulating evenings of wine-fuelled philosophy in the style of French deconstruction was Adrian Frutiger. In 1928, Frutiger had been born in Unterseen (the Bern canton of Switzerland). At age sixteen, he apprenticed as a typesetter. He went on to built a huge reputation for himself. An essay on the wood-carved European letters landed him a job at while France’s Deberny and Peignot where he created several block-buster typefaces. For the Roissy airport, he had a special responsibility. Frutiger had been engaged to create the all-important, airport-wide signage system. It was going to be his job to ensure that users of the mega-facility would be able to transit in and out of the building as seamlessly as possible.
It was assumed that Frutiger would use his celebrity typeface Univers for this project. However, he decided to create a new typeface. Even by his brilliant standards, the signage system that was implemented for Roissy airport is considered a triumph of modern design. Later, Monotype commissioned Frutiger to publish the typeface for wider use. Initially, it was marketed under the name Roissy. As the typeface started to be seen as emblematic of the designer’s philosophy and touch, it was renamed: Frutiger.
Aksidenz Grotesk, Helvetica, and Univers
In the late nineteenth century, a type of simple, austere block-letter based letter-forms, that merchants used for their shop signs, wagons and carts, established itself as a kind of widely seen customary norm. These simple and practical signs were recognised by typographers and designers as functional and expedient letter-form concepts that had been battle-tested for clarity through everyday use (a similar inspiration lay behind England’s Gill Sans). Eventually, towards the end of the 19th century, the letters came to be organised into a standard set of moveable type for printing and referred as Akzidenzschrift (“everyday or jobbing type”). Many cuttings and variations of this typeface style sprung into existence.
The exact canon and patenting history of Aksidenz-Grotesk (“Akzidenz”, as already mentioned, means jobbing or everyday; “Grotesk” of course, means without serifs) is a matter of ongoing research and speculation (for an extended discussion and disputation of this history, nerds may consult Dr. Dan Reynold’s post on the topic). The definitive version of Akzidenz-Grotesk that we use today is published by the H. Berthold type foundry. On their own website, the foundry mentions that:
“Berthold first published Akzidenz-Grotesk in 1898. Originally named “Accidenz-Grotesk” the design originates from Royal Grotesk light by royal type-cutter Ferdinand Theinhardt. The Theinhardt foundry later merged with Berthold and also supplied the regular, medium and bold weights.
In the 1950s Günter Gerhard Lange, then art director at Berthold, began a project to enlarge the typeface family, adding a larger character set, but retaining all of the idiosyncrasies of the 1898 face. Under the direction of Günter Gerhard Lange, Berthold added AG Medium Italic (1963), AG ExtraBold (1966) , AG Italic (1967), AG ExtraBold Condensed & Italic (1968), AG Super (1968).
Lange was instrumental in developing the Akzidenz-Grotesk program at Berthold in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2001 Lange helped Berthold complete the AG series with the additions of AG light italic, Super Italic, light condensed, condensed, medium condensed, extrabold italic, light extended italic, extended italic and medium extended italic.”
As I’ve detailed a bit more elaborately in my story Futura: Grace Under Pressure, this preference for san serif typefaces over Fraktur by German designers led to an ill-tempered debate that almost got some type designers marched to concentration camps. Eventually, the debate settled into being an ideological non-event, with even the Nazis accepting san serif type design. After the war, typeface foundries in Europe were once-again free to market their typefaces to designers in the United States, and designers were free to design in whatever way they chose. In the case of American graphic designers, this means all in exactly the same way.
So, for a while, Futura became their favourite and ubiquitous. Then, they got tired of it and accused it of being a bit stale. Futura itself had been designed by Paul Renner in the 1920s to challenge what he saw as the out-dated popularity of Aksidenz Grotesk. Now, sick of Futura, the post-war consumer market was looking for something a little bit more fresh. This meant that Aksidenz Grotesk was back in fashion!
To cash-in on that trend — the “international” style — both Univers and Helvetica hit the market at almost the same time (around 1957). Coincidentally, both were creations of Swiss-heritage designers. Helvetica was developed by the team of Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas Studio in Switzerland’s Munchenstein. Univers, on the other hand, was developed by Adrian Frutiger in France. While Helvetica took over the United States on the back of a major marketing blitz, many purists considered Univers as technically more sophisticated. As Frutiger would say: “Helvetica is the jeans, Univers is the dinner jacket”.
With few and minor variations, Helvetica and Univers were generic, technological updates of the German Akzidenz-Grotesk. The feature that distinguishes Univers from Akzidenz-Grotesk and Helvetica was the utilisation of the negative space over the black of the letter-form to aid cognition (the letters, like C or the G are slightly more open) — the fundamental principle of Adrian Frutiger’s design philosophy.
The font is where its not: the influence of Chinese philosophy on Swiss theoreticians
Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu — chapter 11
The contribution of Switzerland’s theoreticians to the formal understanding of symbolic information is virtually peerless.
On one hand, there is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1931) who is credited with creating the academic discipline of “semiotics” (the specific term for Saussare’s work, I should hastily add, because it’s very important, is “semiology”). Technically, semiotics is supposed to be a field that concerns itself with the study of the meaning of signs. A sign is not just visual, it can also be tactile, olfactory or gustory (a good example is the tea-soaked madeleine from Proustian memory). From Bernard Parmegiani’s “Indicatif Roissy” we know that it can be an auditory musical note alerting a passenger that an announcement is to follow. In actual practice, however, I found semiotics to be indecipherable field of study — which is really ironic if you think about it.
Saussure’s writing had a heavy influence on many heavy-hitting academicians of the French left such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. In 1967, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, from French to English, as some kind of Bengali-American graduate student side-hustle. This accidental and arbitrary exercise (in what is known locally in Calcutta as atlami) ended up creating an approach to an academic process that is referred to as “deconstructionism”. Spivak, along with Homi K. Bhabha, are notorious amongst university students for being the most obtuse users of the English language (outside the Supreme Court of India). This school of writing is such a joke in the humanities that it has even inspired a novel: Laurence Binet’s 7th Function of Language (staring walk-on parts from Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault). This makes the invented moral panic about “Critical Race Theory” even more hilarious. Back in the day, given my interests (especially, after writing a master’s dissertation on Buddhist legal symbology) the way forward in academia was to do a doctorate in semiotics. If I didn’t want to do that, I could take a radical approach, and study semiology instead. I threw myself out of the nearest window to escape, and no one heard from me again.
The other great Swiss master-symbolist is Carl Jung. Apart from being Freud’s protege, Jung is famous for custom-building a small castle on the banks of a pristine lake, laden with symbol-rich carvings and sculpture (with his wife’s money). He retreated there to paint, sculpt and mediate, living without electricity or running water, as a way to explore layers of his personal subconscious. I’ve written about what a tragedy it is that Jungian psychology’s major practical application these days seems to be for writing Hollywood adventure stories. I was wrong. The bigger tragedy is the pernicious celebrity of Jordon Peterson. However, these digressions need not detain us in understanding Saussure and Jung’s compatriot, Adrain Frutiger.
In his commentary in the Daoist Chinese manual The Secret of the Golden Flower, Carl Jung writes: “just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so too, does the psyche possess a common substratum. I have called the latter the collective subconscious [my emphasis]. As a common heritage it transcends all differences of culture and consciousness and does consist merely of contents capable of becoming conscious, but of talent dispositions toward identical reactions.” He goes on to say: “By its means can be explained the analogy, going even as far as identity, between various-myth themes and symbols, and the possibility of human understanding in general.”
Frutiger doesn’t exactly endorse the idea of a collective subconscious in his treatise, Signs and Symbols. He writes: “It may even be that certain archetypical forms are inherited, and therefore present from the beginning, even in the mind of an unborn child. This is a point on which scientists are not agreed.” However, in laying out a frame-work for how to design signs bearing symbols that can be understood universally, Frutiger seems to have come up with a simple and practical theory that solves the Tower of Babel problem of language that has kept semioticians awake for the better part of a century. As a typographer, Frutiger is not concerned with why a sign works as long as it is does work. Deng Xiaoping would have said: “it doesn’t matter if it is semiotics or semiology, as long as I can find the loo.”
Frutiger’s writing reveals a wide-ranging fascination for and deep reflection about world culture and civilisations. In 1965, Frutiger travelled to Japan and India. Frutiger ended up designing the logo of India’s premier design college, The National Institute of Design, and struck by the beauty of India’s non-Latin scripts, contributed to developing Devanagri and Tamil typefaces.
Like Jung, and Saussure’s brother Leopold (an expert in Chinese astronomy), Frutiger reveals himself to be much interested in Chinese philosophy and culture. In Signs and Symbols, in the chapter on the evolution of writing systems, he traces the casting of yarrow stalks as part of the I-ching divination method of the eight trigrams (which create 64 signs of wisdom) as foundational to the development of the Chinese pictographic script. Frutiger provides a comparative European example: runes. Initially a secret, occult system —these symbols played a similar role in spreading universal literacy. In another part of the book, where he describes the concept of duality and its centrality in design, Frutiger can only but reach for the ying-yang logo as the “most striking graphic expression of this unity of reasoning”.
The concept of contrast was very close to Frutiger’s heart. From the beginning, when he identified his talent for designing books, he started to see himself as an artist of monochrome (Christine Kopp’s documentary on Adrian Frutiger is titled “The Man of Black and White”). Frutiger writes laying down the foundational principle of his theory concerning the design of signs and symbols:
“The actual procedure in drawing or writing is basically not the addition of black but the removal of light. The sculptor’s work also consists essentially of taking something away from the block of stone and in this manner forming it: the final sculpture is always what remains of the material.”
Architecture, the geometry of feeling and universal human language
Our writing and logo systems began when a monkey decided to make marks in the sand with a reed or scratch the wall of a cave with a rock. From here, we see the human love for patterns emerge in the Blombos cave and the spectacular and breath-taking Altamira bison that Satyajit Ray’s anthropologist raves and rages about in Aguntuk (The Stranger). Revealing the movie’s central thesis, the anthropologist complains that he had been denied the ability to make such art because he had been educated in Shakespeare. From England’s The White Horse of Uffington, the Peruvian pampas, and the Atacama Desert of Chile, giant shapes have been made, often through circumambulation through walking. There is no explanation for why our ancestors liked walking in shapes or patterns for religious reasons. The closest such ritual nowadays exists in run mapping apps and such GPS based mapping systems.
At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky liked to ask his students to associate a primary colours (red, blue or yellow) with a primary shapes (triangle, circle or square) to understand if colour could be perceived have intrinsic, natural shapes. Frutiger is a master-theoreticians of forms devoid of colour.
People who have read Frutiger’s Signs and Symbols talk about how it opened up the field of typography for them. Reading it was certainly a life-affirming experience for me. It brought together ideas that were fragmented in my head, it validated those that I was privately concerned I was mad for thinking, and it provided simple and elegant answers to some very complex questions.
The book is a collection of three volumes. In the first part, Frutiger tackles the basic elements of a symbol with an emphasis on how shape, line weight and even decorative endings contribute to stylistic variation. The second part deals with the evolution of the latin alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks. The last and third part has to do with how pictures, by the same process of evolutionary variation and differentiation by which figurative drawings become ideograms and then become phonetic, can become symbols and then signs.
After reading the book, it becomes clear that there is a straight-line between the opening chapter, a discussion of the positioning of dots on a dice, and the entire signage system for an airport. In a simple demonstration, Frutiger varies the placements of the dots and shows how we read different combinations differently. We carry a memory of the usual places of a dice’s dots, and when they are out of place, our minds scramble to interpret meaning from the new arrangements. This pattern-making process goes on endlessly in the human subconscious — lining up memory, meaning, shapes and emotion. The same process by which we read a dice, we read the signage system of an airport.
Frutiger lays it out, step-by-step, table-by-table, 1–2–3. This is a tour de force, maybe even a Tour de France, of a primer on graphic design. Loaded with hundreds of logos and tables, the book is as relentless as it is exhaustive — and, exhausting — to read. In the end, however, the entire book is almost summarised in a concluding table. This table explains how a figurative picture can be abstracted to become a symbol and then a sign. As they say, a good sign is worth a 100,000 words (and a 1,000 years of history). Nobody says that. I just made it up.
The weird part is that after reading this book, even though it is completely practical and hardly contains any theory, I think I finally understand semiotics. Sorry, I mean semiology.
God of Interpolation
A large international airport is the apex form of industrial architecture.
This kind of transnational, inter-racial, multicultural hybridising behemoth of a building, through which the world’s people transit, speaking hundreds of tongues and utilise for pure function (rather than for religion or art) is unprecedented in human culture. Dragon-like machines, emitting roars and fumes, attach themselves to the building’s hubs and await to bear people away to faraway lands or to disgorge them to discover that their luggage has been left behind.
Modernist typographers of the early 20th century had started to anticipate this phenomenon of mass culture when they were experimenting with mechanical design and abstract, universal logo-forms. In the work of Paul Renner, in particular, his experiments in using abstract shapes to build-letter forms, pantographs to design letter-forms, and writing speculatively about how “engineers” (the term that was eventually settled on by us is “computers”) would aid graphic design — decades before screens and machine-aided design became de rigueur — has proven to be prophetic. Additionally, the technology, culture and spaces that we take for granted today could not exist without the wide use of computers in human affairs, whether to fly aeroplanes, design time-tables, display information, conduct business, communicate or just amuse ourselves while we wait. What we call “icons” for apps can certainly be traced to the work done to make universal logogram signs for a restaurant in an airport — the process that the last third of Frutiger’s book is dedicated to. If the interface of our computers or a phone was transmuted to a physical space, it would look a lot like an international airport like Roissy.
The great master-designers of the early 20th century were often artisans who were also educators and writers. Edward Johnston, Eric Gill, Paul Renner, Jan Tschichold or, for that matter, Adrian Frutiger — they were all practitioners, authors and teachers. Of them, the last in this great European lineage (yes, all White men), Frutiger used the most amount of math in his work. Yet, like Jung, he treated science as means to an end, not the end in itself.
Deberny & Peignot had established itself as a leader in the new technology of phototypesetting (in which typeface variations were stored as glass discs rather than as solid metal type). One specific modern feature that Frutiger had designed Univers around was a kind of interpolation — designing the glyphs to maintain their size-ratio through the application of math. He achieved this by devising a dual number scale. The scale went from 1 to 10, and tracked two metrics. The first number indicated weight, while the second number denoted width and position. For example, Univers 22 denoted an ultra light weight and ultra extended width. Univers 55 (being the middle of the scale) would be the normal size and incline; while Univers 99 would be heavy black and ultra condensed. Variations of the two numbers allowed a typographer to identify specifically the thickness and orientation of a typeface. Previously, font variations within a typeface family were much more abitrary and difficult to quantify.
Frutiger’s life was not untouched by tragedy. His lost both his daughters to mental illness, and in another coincidental parallel with Carl Jung, devoted some of his private time on a foundation that addressed the state of psychiatric care in Switzerland. When I discovered how Paul Renner took on the Nazis by publishing Kulturbolschewismus? I was convinced that Futura contained some of the steel and moral rectitude of Paul Renner’s character. Similarly, Frutiger too seems to be imbued with its creator’s assuring and becalming humanism, his huge thirst to know the world’s culture. I was not surprised to discover that Frutiger is the core typeface for the UK’s National Health Service.
So, how does one summarise Adrian Frutiger’s contributions to graphic design? A start could be made by pointing out his concrete achievements: he designed several beloved typefaces such Univers, Frutiger, and Avenir. We note that he achieved a perfect theoretical synthesis of Swiss Jungian psychology and French deconstruction, developing a working concept that explained step-by-step how a picture becomes a non-phonetic language of signs and signals that can be understood universally. The balance between theory and practice was what made him the designer’s designer.
This is what is revealed when we deconstruct the typeface that we call Frutiger.
[P.S. This is a great post about interpolation: https://www.lucasfonts.com/learn/interpolation-theory]
