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URW Grotesk Font

Designer: Hermann Zapf
Publisher: URW Type Foundry

Designed by Hermann Zapf, URW Grotesk is a screen sans and sans serif typeface family. This typeface has fifty-nine designs and was published by URW Type Foundry.

URW Grotesk was created specifically for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985, together with URW Antiqua. At that time, we were dealing with a large German publishing home (Axel Springer) on type style services to replace specific of their paper typefaces. Test pages of big German papers (e.g. Bild) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not revealed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never ever utilized URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose.

Zapf's intent for the 2 typefaces was to develop two balancing, extremely legible, open and classic font styles that could be used for any type of typography, especially books, newspapers, publications, etc.

However, we understood later on, that URW Grotesk is likewise effectively suited for electronic publishing like for instance web embedding, apps and alike. It's open forms and generous character render really well at low and medium resolution, at high resolution anyway.

Later on, URW Grotesk as well as URW Antiqua were broadened at URW's type design studio making use of the complete power of the IKARUS software as two out of ten URW exclusive very families with 50 or more styles.

Today, URW Antiqua along with URW Grotesk are among the most popular URW fonts. This does not visited mishap or luck but by style work produced by the crucial and considerable German type designer and calligrapher of the 20th century.