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Beyond Univers and Avenir:

Akira Kobayashi reminisces on Adrian Frutiger

Japanese type designer and 2022 Type Directors Club Medalist Akira Kobayashi has a robust, more than a 39-year long career: he contributed deeply to bridging the Eastern and Western typographic worlds, created over 50 Latin type families, and now works with Monotype as their Creative Type Director.

In 2003 he had a chance to work shoulder to shoulder with another titan and the TDC medalist of 1987—Adrian Frutiger. They met when Akira had joined Linotype and worked on Avenir Next, a remake of Adrian’s renowned Avenir typeface.

For Kobayashi, the collaborative project with Frutiger meant more than a simple re-edition of his classic typeface, as once his book drastically changed the young designer’s life and he finally got the chance to express his gratitude. In the text, Akira reveals moments he shared with the outstanding figure and opens up a bit about joint work with another prominent designer and TDC Medalist, Hermann Zapf.

Adrian Frutiger
(1928–2015)

Swiss typeface designer, who created dozens of notable typefaces with Univers, Frutiger and Avenir being the gems, lettering systems for Paris Métro and Paris Orly Airport, and signage systems for Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Be your hardest critic

Adrian Frutiger always explained the most important aspects of type design in simple and plain words. He once said, “The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there. If you remember the shape of a spoon with which you just ate some soup, then the spoon had a poor shape.”

I also preach this idea: type has to function without being noticed, it relates to aesthetics.

So when it comes to type design, I try to be the harshest critic of my work. I look at my type samples from a distance, print some words, and scrutinize them upside-down and from the back. Sitting beside Frutiger and watching how he inspected the type proof, I realized that what he was doing was exactly the same thing.

Neue Frutiger typeface in use at Kanazawa bullet train station. Photo by Akira Kobayashi.

Creativity standing on passion

This photo was taken by my colleague from Linotype in Adrian Frutiger’s atelier while we were working on Avenir Next. It shows Adrian drawing oldstyle figures with the red pen I used to mark up corrections on the printouts. At that moment, I was about to propose adding oldstyle figures to the family, and planned to explain to him the OpenType format and possible typographic variations it suggested. But Frutiger immediately started drawing figures on his own. I didn’t need to convince him and had no time to offer a more suitable pen. It seemed that OpenType technology was created to catch up with his ideas.