It'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.

Hey, don't hate on DIN :)

For a font designed in 1931, it's impressively timeless. It doesn't seem to communicate any particular era or emotion, so it suits almost anything especially in digital form.

Both Google's Roboto and Apple's new San Francisco display fonts seem heavily inspired by DIN (just IMHO of course).

> "It doesn't seem to communicate any particular era or emotion"

I'm not wholly sure about that; the strict adherence to line thickness and limited set of curvature angles make me feel like it was adapted from the "font" created by necessity when using road-painting equipment to write asphalt road signs. It which lends the font a "we couldn't do better in one case so let's at least unify on something" feeling that's slightly modernist, similar to logos from the 70s that use unnecessary all-caps to look "digital" because they work with green-screens that don't display lower-case.

True, DIN certainly is a compromise. Of course the version we're accustomed to is never the 1931 standard committee's original take, but a digital modernization.

The de rigueur digital version is FF DIN by FontFont, which was released in 1995:

https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-din

The changes made in this 1995 version are described thus:

"The shape of the new FF DIN differs from the original mostly by thinner horizontal strokes and by more fluent curves."

So, sounds like you're absolutely right -- line thickness and curvature were reworked to make the typeface more generally useful. (To my taste, all the weights of FF DIN look excellent on a high-dpi screen.)

I can't give you chapter and verse on this, but when the first autobahns were built, they were composed of straight sections and constant curvature bends. This was perceived by engineers to be the rational way. Landscape designers (who were also involved) eventually convinced the engineers to adopt more sinuous curves, which of course also create transitions (clothoid or Cornu spiral sections) which made the roads easier to drive on.

Found a reference: Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn. p.130 onwards.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=Kq_Ys4BlA6cC&lpg=PP1&hl=nl&... (starts on p. 129 really)

DIN is timeless! I think that it is beatiful font, with its cold appeal (it's the coldest font I think). I think Conduit also have this feeling a bit...

"Via", used on danish railways, is somewhat famous for it's iconic lowercase "g", saving space on signs which usually don't have much vertical height: http://typedesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kontrapunkt_D...

That g in type design circles is often referred to as the "Copenhagen" or "Danish" g because of its prevalence there... it seems like the Danes just don't like writing the last part of the g!

For instance, this sign from 1897 [1] contains many examples of it, even on the street sign on the top right corner.

For more examples, I suggest a browse through http://www.copenhagentype.dk/

[1] http://www.lundwp.lamp.magnifik.dk/wp-content/uploads/2013/1...

Actually, DIN looks pretty well IMO. Its unusual x-height means it's not suited for all uses (I don't think it would really work for body copy), but every now and then I see it used on some sites and it looks surprisingly good. I think genius.com uses it for song titles.

My favorite in the U.S. that I hope catches on is ClearView, which I first noticed in Madison, Wisconsin: https://promega.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/better-living-throu...

It's not going to happen in the US[1]:

> In April 2014, FHWA indicated it expects to rescind Interim Approval to use Clearview.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_%28typeface%29

I wonder how much the DIN font is optimized for longer german words. While I don't like it as much as the others, Frutiger would be much wider than it, which in practical terms might be bad.

German is pretty common in Switzerland, too...

For long place names, they often use a narrower variant, which is a bit ugly when mixed with normal width on signage.

The US and a variety of other [EDIT: countries] use the FHWA Series fonts (aka Highway Gothic) which, in their original form, date to 1948.

Tobias Frere-Jones came up with a typeface called Interstate in 1990s that's quite similar but adapted for print and screen. It's a nice typeface. Red Hat released a FOSS variant called Overpass. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overpass_Fonts

Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tratex

Is the sample from wikipedia indicative of the typical kerning for Tratex? If so, that'd be unfortunate...

The kerning is quite wide, yes.

Real life example: http://www.trelleborg.se/files/Centralt/Bilder/Historiskt/By...

Not just wide, but off balance.

Not the most beautiful font, but I love the handwriting-style lowercase a.

The 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://www.notion.so

RIP Mr Frutiger, who perhaps did more for sans serif than anyone else since Eric Gill.

> 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.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, etc.

I have a similar antipathy for Quora for requiring facebook logins to view their content (not actually theirs, their users' content) that came up during search results.

I believe they've now dropped the facebook login requirement, and I think they now show a lot of content from organic search traffic, but I plan on ignoring them anyway for as long as possible.

Oh, I don't disagree that the specific method followed by this site is garbage. I just felt that the comment I was replying to was overanalyzing the motives behind a relatively innocuous (if poorly thought out) piece of content.

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.

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...

The reason they probably had to do this was because contentEditable works differently in each browser, and probably even between versions. I've tried to make a similar component earlier, and it was a frustrating experience. Pretty sure they'd have supported all browsers if it was just about typical HTML and CSS.

If this is true (I don't know), we should blame the lack of standardization instead.

Frutiger'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...

Thanks for sharing that quote!

It summarizes exactly what I've felt since I first encountered his fonts, which is that they have an amazing "neutralness" to them. The Avenir font started with Futura and smoothed out its distinctive quirks. I sometimes have to look closely before being sure a font is really Avenir, just because it lacks any imperfections that might betray it as something similar, like Gotham.

His fonts might never be as famous as others because their distinctive characteristic is how impeccably unobstrustive they are.

Do you know where to find them? Preferably free, if they're on an archive somewhere or similar. They seem to be in german as well, am I correct in this?

"Adrian Frutiger - Typographer" (1999) was released in English, French, German and Italian. It was released in DVD format in 2004. It's listed on amazon.de [0] but seems to be out of stock at the moment. It seems to be available in libraries across Germany and Switzerland [1].

"The Man of Black and White: Adrian Frutiger" (2005) was released in Swiss German and German in DVD format. It's also listed on amazon.de [2] but seems to be out of stock at the moment. The San Francisco Public Library [3] seems to have a copy though.

Sebastian Rohner of R.Films shot an interview with Adrian Frutiger at his home in Switzerland in 2007. It's available in German on YouTube [4].

[0] http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-Schriftengestalter/dp/B...

[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/adrian-frutiger-schriftengest...

[2] http://www.amazon.de/Adrian-Frutiger-Mann-Schwarz-Weiss/dp/3...

[3] https://www.worldcat.org/title/mann-von-schwarz-und-weiss-ad...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipGFasprntg

Thank you for being so thorough and informative though I seemingly won't get hold of these films. After reading the comment thread in the "playing with pigs" article, this is a ray of sunshine.

If you haven't seen it, there's also a documentary (in English) called Helvetica that isn't about Frutiger but certainly gets into a lot of discussion about the international typographic style more broadly.

The article states that some of his fonts are highly legible at distances and thus used for some road signs. I'm curious, is there an objective way to determine whether one font is more legible than another, or is it purely subjective? Obviously some fonts are clearly more legible than others, but between the "legible fonts," can one say objectively that one is more legible than another? Can a computer create a font that is the "most" objectively legible?

It can, and is objectively measured and tested.

Here is a great article in the NY Times magazine about the creation of a new font, Clearview, for highway signage: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pa...

Gill Sans and Zapf's Optima were the first big humanist fonts, but they are really best used sparsely. Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

But with Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger the whole world was blown open. Helvetica had a predecessor fairly like it in Akzidenz Grotesk, but Frutiger was something else entirely. Grotesques had been around for decades prior to Helvetica. Frutiger was a revolution. I and everybody should know that our visual world is markedly different because of Adrian Frutiger.

Right now, I am on a Windows tablet. Segoe UI, Tahoma, Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Microsoft's (and Matthew Carter's in particular) font efforts here were, but for Arial, so very much direct descendants, if not copies, of Frutiger's Frutiger. The default font in Microsoft Word must count Frutiger as it's most influential ancestor, bar none.

On Mac OS X, Lucida Sans is just the same, carrying Frutiger's DNA utterly. And on Linux, Bitstream Vera is just the same.

And it's not just Frutiger. Mac OS X's new default font, San Francisco is very much Univers, with some DIN. Univers is the designer's default font of choice for anywhere that Helvetica isn't chosen. I love its condensed form, as used here by Australia Post, and its numbering system was influential too and expressed an incredible range of variation within a single family. It is the ultimate tight font.

Avenir was a wonderful reinterpretation of Futura, Serifa is the most sensible slab serif, and the only generally acceptable one next to Rockwell... and that's nothing to say of the cross-pollination of his Frutiger with Univers and Helvetica. Think Roboto and basically half of what's on Google Fonts.

His influence on Erik Spiekermann, who drew some fonts that blew the visual landscape open in the 90s and early 2000s is insane when combined with the dutch Thesis and Scala. His influence on every fixed width font that has become popular on computers after Courier New is similarly huge.

Adrian Frutiger is, with no doubt, the person that drew our languages the most in the past century, Akzidenz Grotesk coming from 1896. His shapes influenced every comment you read here more than any other person in the past century. He made things legible and beautiful. Even for computers he did, with OCR-B.

I think that now with us in a post-Frutiger era, it's going to take a very, very long while for someone to come along and change our written language and visual world with such a bombshell as he did. If ever again - that is a very serious question.

We are now entering an area where there's fewer new ideas, but refinement and cross-pollination. The landscape seems like it's settling, with typefaces like Gotham and San Francisco and Roboto being very evolutionary... but with not that much of a way forward? There's been few new strands of DNA in the typeface world since Spiekermann's Meta. (and its very contemporary siblings Thesis and Scala)

Let's hope that like the Dalai Lama, we can find Frutiger reincarnated in a new form so that in a few decades he may once again shine us a light and bring to us a genuine future, like his Frutiger had brought upon us before.

Either that or we just A-B test signage typefaces out the wazoo and see if something as amazing as that somehow emerges a million generations from now, possibly even within the confines of the Latin alphabet. DIN 1451, which had some influence an Frutiger, isn't spent yet, I don't think. Meta probably is spent by now. Gill Sans is getting close, because of Gotham. Frutiger is getting there :/

We now live in a post-Frutiger world. That's kind of scary, if you think about it.

Whatever comes, I hope to at least see the next Frutiger's work and what it means for mankind before I die. I expect it to be interesting.

> Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

Somehow, I missed that news.

Damn, the world of typography lost two of its biggest visionaries this summer alone.

I always preferred Zapf's fonts to Frutiger's by a wide margin (I always favor serif fonts over sans serifs), but they were both brilliant men, and typography won't be the same without either.

>> Zapf died earlier this year, by the way.

> Somehow, I missed that news.

I did submit the news to HN, but it received no attention, alas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692624

Zapf has made some excellent sans serifs. Optima is likely the one you've seen the most, but there's URW Grotesk, too.

(In the first line, I forgot about the less ubiquitous Johnston as a slow cooking predecessor to Gill Sans, sorry)

I'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-...

First Hermann Zapf in June, now Adrian Frutiger. As a font geek, I am mourning.

Any links to the design philosophy behind the Frutiger font?

If Wikipedia doesn't satisfy you, maybe try the "complete works" book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface)

very sad to hear - he at least achieved the status where people all over the world are going to miss and remember him

Exactly, and yet people look at me weird when I express that being remembered is a worthy pursuit of one's existence, and that the enjoyment of solitary creation is comparable to that of hanging out having some more socially accepted form of 'fun'</rant>

Yes, assuming it is being remembered for something other humans appreciate and are grateful for (as is the case here).

Only you don't get to enjoy "being remembered".

I wonder what font will be on his epitaph.