use the typeface ASTRA-Frutiger. Frutiger is a
sans-serif typeface by the Swiss type designer
Adrian Frutiger. It is the text version of Frutiger's earlier typeface Roissy, commissioned in 1970/71 by the newly built
Charles de Gaulle Airport at
Roissy-en-France,
France, which needed a new directional sign system, which itself was based on Concorde, a font Frutiger had created in the early 1960s. The beginning of Frutiger starts from Concorde, a sans-serif font Frutiger was commissioned to design in 1961-4 by the minor metal type company Sofratype. Frutiger was asked to create a design that would not be too similar to his previous
Univers, a reinvention of classic 19th-century typefaces. In practice the design was drawn by his colleague (and fellow Swiss in Paris)
André Gürtler as Frutiger was busy. Frutiger wrote of it: "I felt I was on the right track with this grotesque; it was a truly novel typeface." Gürtler too wrote of feeling that the design was innovative: "this style didn't exist in grotesques at the time, except for
Gill Sans." Despite Frutiger and Gürtler's enthusiasm, the design failed to sell well and was discontinued with the end of the metal type period: Frutiger wrote that Linotype, who bought Sofratype, "weren't aware of the fact that with Concorde they had a totally up-to-date typeface." Some years later, Frutiger was commissioned to develop a typeface for
Roissy Airport. Frutiger had earlier created an alphabet inspired by Univers and
Peignot for Paris
Orly Airport, but found the experience a failure due to lack of control and the insistence that all text be in
capitals only. As a result, he proposed a modified version of Concorde, refining it following research into legibility. The Roissy typeface was completed in 1972. Impressed by the quality of the Roissy airport signage, the typographical director of the
Mergenthaler Linotype Company approached Frutiger in 1974 to turn it into a typeface for print. While the open apertures of the lowercase letters
a,
c,
e and
s are testament to the humanist design, other characters are more similar in proportion to
grotesque and
neo-grotesque types like Frutiger's own
Univers. Improvements on Roissy included better spacing. The Frutiger family was released publicly in 1976 by the Stempel type foundry in conjunction with Linotype. Frutiger became extremely popular for uses such as corporate and transportation branding. In 2008 it was the fifth best-selling typeface of the Linotype foundry.
Frutiger Linotype This is a version of the original Frutiger font family licensed to Microsoft. This family consists of Frutiger 55, 56, 65, and 66. It does not include OpenType features or kerning, but it adds support to Latin Extended-B and Greek characters, with Frutiger 55 supporting extra IPA characters and spacing modifier letters. Unlike most Frutiger variants, Frutiger Linotype features
old-style figures as the default numeral style. Frutiger Linotype can be found in Microsoft products featuring
Microsoft Reader and in the standalone Microsoft Reader package.
ASTRA-Frutiger This is a variant of Frutiger used by ASTRA (acronym of the '''', the Swiss Federal Road Office) as the new font for traffic signs, replacing
VSS in 2003. It is based on Frutiger 57 Condensed, but with widening ascenders and descenders, which are intended to give the eye a better hold than the earlier version did. A family of two fonts were made, called ASTRA-Frutiger-Standard/standard and ASTRA-Frutiger-Autobahn/autoroute. ==Frutiger Next (2000)==