Frutiger was asked to create a design that would not be too similar to his previous Univers, a reinvention of classic 19th-century typefaces. 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. 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, France, which needed a new directional sign system, which itself was based on Concorde, a font Frutiger had created in the early 1960s. New Swiss road signs near Lugano use the typeface ASTRA-Frutigerįrutiger is a sans-serif typeface by the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger.
