One of the best-known type-designers was born in 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland. Adrian Frutiger has produced many well-known and commonly used typefaces. He began working at the age of 16 as an apprentice for a printer near Interlaken. After attending the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, he moved to Paris and began working at a type foundry while exploring the creation of fonts himself.
In 1952 Frutiger came out with his first typeface, President. He produced this fond while working at Deberny & Peignot type foundry and it was a critical part of his development as a designer because he learned much about the letterforms which he applied later to his future designs. He created Méridien in 1955 and this is supposed to be thought of his first significant typeface, and inspired by 16th-century Jenson. Univers was released in 1956 and during the 1990s, Frutiger worked with Linotype to expand his classic Univers family. When they were finished, Linotype Univers consisted of 63 different weights, which were each compatible with each other.
President, Méridien, and Univers are just three of the many fonts that Frutiger has created between the 1950’s to 1990’s. Frutiger is still alive and some of his recent projects include designing a new watch face for a limited-edition line of watches for a Swiss watchmaker. The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India hired him to design a word mark and they actually changed their name to match the NID logotype he came up with.

Why is Univers unique?

Univers was designed in 1956 and features optically even stroke weights and a large x-height to improve legibility. The 21 different styles and varities of weights and widths included in the family set it apart from other font families. Univers was the first type family to have a numbering system rather then using names.

http://www.typophile.com/node/12118
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Frutiger