In 1968, Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger was given an enormous responsibility. He was charged with designing a new typeface for one of Europe’s busiest and most prestigious airports: Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Fortunately, Adrian Frutiger had plenty of pedigree in that particular field. He’d already got several successful typeface development projects on his resume. Univers, the popular sans-serif font family, for example, had been developed by Frutiger in the 1950s, establishing the Swede as a master of his craft. He even had experience with Parisian airport fonts, having been hired to create an entire alphabet for Paris Orly Airport some years earlier. Thus, he appeared to be the perfect man for the job, and so it proved.
Taking Concorde—a sans-serif font designed by Frutiger in the early 1960s—as his foundation, the Swede made some clever adjustments to improve legibility. He brought all the benefits of his experience and expertise to the design, focusing on readability and clean lines above all else. The result? “Roissy,” named after the location of Charles de Gaulle Airport, and later renamed “Frutiger,” when it was released for widespread use in 1976.
Since then, the Frutiger typeface has become one of the world’s most famous and beloved. Leading designers from Steve Matteson to Erik Spiekermann class it among the greatest typefaces of all, and it’s not hard to see why. With its gentle curves and total absence of any artistic flourishes or distractions, the Frutiger typeface embodies cleanliness and legibility. Indeed, it’s famed for being one of the easiest fonts to read, regardless of angle, viewing distance, or text size.
Thus, if you’re looking for a font with similar characteristics, it makes sense to focus on those that are similar in style to Frutiger. That’s what this list is here to help with. Let’s take a look at 10 fonts similar to Frutiger, with similar levels of readability, along with their own distinctive characteristics.
10 Fonts That Are Similar to Frutiger in Style and Impact
Frequently Asked Questions
Adrian Frutiger was one of the most celebrated and successful typeface designers of all time. Some of his best-known designs, like Univers, Frutiger, and Avenir, are regarded among the most versatile and useful typefaces ever created, and his work spanned the breadth of typeface genres, from humanist to neo-grotesque.
The first big difference between Helvetica and Frutiger concerns classification. Helvetica is generally classed as a grotesque or neo-grotesque sans-serif font, while Frutiger falls into the humanist category. There’s a little extra roundness to Frutiger’s shapes, with longer ascenders and a slightly shorter x-height.
No, Frutiger is not currently available in the Google Fonts collection. However, there are several Google-based fonts that have strikingly similar designs to Frutiger, such as Roboto and Istok Web.
Key characteristics of Frutiger include its usage of very clean and minimalist symbols, maximizing legibility over everything else. Free of artistic flourishes, Adrian Frutiger even described his font as embodying a kind of “nudity” compared to the more artistic alternatives. Frutiger is also noted for its use of square dots over letters like “i” and “j,” and its wide, open apertures for letters like “a” and “s.”
Some famous real-world examples of the Frutiger font in use include the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. and branding for companies like RadioShack.
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