Adrian Frutiger is a typeface designer who is best known for creating the typefaces Univers and Frutiger. His work helped influence the growth of digital typography and his fonts are used by many designers still today.
Frutiger was born in 1928 in Switzerland and from a young age was encouraged to work with print making. He has a love for sculpting, and perhaps one can notice an influence in his work, but his family and professors pushed that he worked with type. At the age of 16 he became an apprentice as a compositor and soon went to a school of the applied arts, finding an interest in calligraphy.
Univers Along side his more popular typefaces, he also designed "President," "Meridien," and "Ondine" to name a few. His font, Univers, was actually created when he was asked by the Public Transport Authority of Paris to look into the metro signage. His goal was to have enough of a font variation to compliment white-on-dark-blue backgrounds in bad lighting. If one wanted to look into his earlier work, they could view Schrift / Ecriture / Lettering: the development of European letter types carved in wood. This uniquely shows his understanding of letterforms and design skills.
Univers, specifically, has a few unique qualities. To start, Univers was the first typeface to include the number system. It also has a higher x hight and an even stroke width which "allows it to be more readable." (1) It also uses what is known to be the Univers Grid. This is simply a chart that grafts the different styles a font may have regarding stroke weight and kerning.
(1) (http://melindadraut.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/adrian-frutiger-and-the-univers-grid/)
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