The Most Famous

DESIGNERS from Switzerland

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This page contains a list of the greatest Swiss Designers. The pantheon dataset contains 104 Designers, 2 of which were born in Switzerland. This makes Switzerland the birth place of the 10th most number of Designers behind Russia, and Denmark.

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Swiss Designers of all time. This list of famous Swiss Designers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Adrian Frutiger

1. Adrian Frutiger (1928 - 2015)

With an HPI of 56.40, Adrian Frutiger is the most famous Swiss Designer.  His biography has been translated into 30 different languages on wikipedia.

Adrian Johann Frutiger (Swiss Standard German: [ˈaːdriaːn ˈjoːhan ˈfruːtɪɡər]; 24 May 1928 – 10 September 2015) was a Swiss typeface designer who influenced the direction of type design in the second half of the 20th century. His career spanned the hot metal, phototypesetting and digital typesetting eras. Until his death, he lived in Bremgarten bei Bern. Frutiger's most famous designs, Univers, Frutiger and Avenir, are landmark sans-serif families spanning the three main genres of sans-serif typefaces: neogrotesque, humanist and geometric. Univers was notable for being one of the first sans-serif faces to form a consistent but wide-ranging family, across a range of widths and weights. Frutiger described creating sans-serif types as his "main life's work", partially due to the difficulty in designing them compared to serif fonts.

Photo of Max Miedinger

2. Max Miedinger (1910 - 1980)

With an HPI of 47.68, Max Miedinger is the 2nd most famous Swiss Designer.  His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Max Miedinger (24 December 1910 – 8 March 1980) was a Swiss typeface designer, best known for creating the Neue Haas Grotesk typeface in 1957, renamed Helvetica in 1960. Marketed as a symbol of cutting-edge Swiss technology, Helvetica achieved immediate global success. Between 1926 and 1930 Miedinger trained as a typesetter in Zurich, after which he attended evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich. By the time Miedinger died in 1980, his Helvetica idea, for which the company Linotype paid him royalties until the time of his death, had become a huge part of the typographical landscape.

People

Pantheon has 2 people classified as Swiss designers born between 1910 and 1928. Of these 2, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased Swiss designers include Adrian Frutiger, and Max Miedinger.

Deceased Swiss Designers

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