John Baskerville was born in Worverly, Worcestershire England on January 28th, 1706. Throughout his lifetime he made his living by being a type designer, writing master and a printer. In 1725 Baskerville moved to Birmingham where he eventually became a writing master in 1733. By 1740 he was able to set up his own type foundry and printing works. As a result of this new business, his profits allowed him to experiment with typefounding. One of his first projects done in 1757 when his first printed book was published. This was an edition of Virgil, and soon after in 1758 en edition of John Milton followed. Baskerville's masterpiece came in 1763 when he completed an edition of the Bible. As a result of this, Baskerville was appointed as the printer at the University of Cambridge in 1758. Another important work came from Baskerville in 1763 when he designed a New Testament in Greek Type. By 1770 Baskerville was able to print and produce a four volume edition of Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." Baskerville passed away on January 8th, 1775 but his legacy lives on with the use of his typefaces still in the circuit today. Baskerville's type was recognizable due to his bold quality, high gloss paper and also the true black ink he used that he also invented. In 1953 the Cambridge University Press received Baskerville's original letter stamps and matrices from a donation.

Baskerville is unique in several ways, commonly for its large X-height which improves readability. It also has four different weights including roman, semibold, bold and heavy. Due to its "tail" present in many letters it is a very graceful fond and it very effective when it is in a large font size.

Adrian Frutiger is a famous Swiss designer born in 1928. He began his career as an apprentice as a compositor. Soon after he received more training in type and graphics at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts from 1949-51 where he was taught by Alfred Williams and Walter Kach. He moved to Paris in 1952 to pursue a career as a typeface designer and Artistic Manager at Derberny and Peignot. His early creations included Phoebus, Ondine and Meridien. He is known for makig some of the earliest typefaces for photocomposition. He established himself internationally with the creation and design of the Univers sans-serif typeface. It was originally intended for metal and film in 1957. Frutiger founded his own studio with Bruno Pfaffli and Andre Gurtler near Paris in 1961. He worked as a professor for ten years and the Ecole Estienne and also for eight years in a Paris school. In addition to being a designer, Frutiger also worked as a consultant to IBM and also Stempel type foundry. He also produced the typeface for the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport in the early 1970's- in 1977 this font was released as the Frutiger typeface. In honor of Frutiger's 80th birthday in 2008 he collaborated with other designers to rework the Meridien typeface which resulted in the new Frutiger Serif. Frutiger has created over fifty fonts, some of which include Courier New, OCR A, OCR B, Serifa, Versailles, and Zurich.

Univers in a unique typeface because it was the first modular type family which includes 21 face, 5 weights and 4 widths. It has become known as the "alternative" to Helvetica.
The univers grid was originally used by Frutiger as a way to present the type family in a systematic way that would be organized by width and thickness.