URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with
URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with
URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used
URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose.
Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families.
Zapf's intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc.
However, we realized later on, that
URW Grotesk is very well suited for multimedia applications on screen.
File Size: 3.7 MB
Release date: November 7, 2010
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
- Website publishing: create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
- PDFs: embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
- Video and broadcast: use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content and more
- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)