Baskerville and Frutiger Blog

John Baskerville is the inventor of the very famous baskerville type.  He is one of the most famous typographers, as he started the usage of leading and adding wide margins.  Leading is the space between lines of text in a text block and is very important because it can increase legibility in a block of text.  John Baskerville was English, worked with the University of Cambridge, and well respected for his type style.  His first published book was an addition of Virgil.  His most famous font, emphasized the contrast of light and heavy lines.  This makes the serifs look sharper.  This font is more consistent in its form than previous fonts because curved letters are rounded, keeping more of a regularity.  Baskerville font has a simple and refined feeling.  Ironically, Baskerville was only popular for a very short time when John Baskerville came up with it in the mid 18th century.  It was not popular again until the 20th century when others such as Bruce Rogers took interest in the font.  Since then, Baskerville has been refined and taken on new forms.  The new forms of Baskerville as well as the original continue to be very popular today.   

Adrian Frutiger was an incredibly influential Swiss-born typographer who is most famous for inventing the typefaces Univers and Frutiger.  Frutiger grew up in Switzerland, interested in calligraphy and sculpture.  He has practiced woodcuts his whole life and focused solely on woodcuts most recently.  He is most widely known, however, for his typeface Univers, and the grid that makes up the typeface family of Univers.  Univers is a sans serif typeface and is unique by the large family within the typeface.  Universe actually represents the original modular in the type family.  The family consists of varying weights and widths.  The four original widths include condensed, ultra condensed, regular, and extended.  Univers is often used as an alternative to Helvetica, as it has a wide range of uses because of its large family.  Adrian Frutiger developed a numbering system known as Frutiger's grid in order to clarify and differentiate the different typefaces within Univers.  Numbers are used to identify the different cuts.  For example, 55 stands for Roman, and 75 stands for bold.  This numbering system became so useful that it has been adopted and used with Frutiger's other fonts (Serifa, Avenir, Glyphic, and Frutiger), as well as with Helvetica. Frutiger's grid organizes in a simple way the many typefaces within a font, and is incredibly useful today.