URW Type Foundry
| URW Type Foundry GmbH
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|---|---|
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| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | January 1, 1996 |
| Seat | Hamburg |
| management | Christofer Linusson |
| Branch | Font maker |
| Website | www.urwtype.com/ |
The URW Type Foundry GmbH ( formerly URW ++ Design & Development GmbH ) is a type foundry based in Hamburg . Well-known URW typefaces include Nimbus Sans L , Nimbus Roman No9 L , URW Antiqua, URW Grotesk, URW Palladio, URW Latino, URW Classico, URW Alcuin and Corporate ASE in collaboration with Kurt Weidemann .
URW was u. a. also known for making some of her fonts available to the open source community as free fonts. These are used in open source projects such as Ghostscript .
history
URW was as U nternehmensberatung R ubow W established boar GmbH in 1971 by Gerhard Rubow and Juergen Weber. Peter Karow was soon added as the third partner, and the company was later renamed URW Software & Type GmbH (URW for short).
In the following years, products were developed in the graphic industry: typesetting and layout programs for publishers to use the Digiset and software for image processing in the Hell Chromacom system from Hell .
In 1983 URW developed a system for cutting different lettering and figures into colored, self-adhesive films for outdoor advertising. In 1975 Ikarus was introduced, a program that can digitally store the contours of a letter along with all the necessary information for electronic typesetting, and it became a standard in the type industry. For the revision and manipulation of single letters or whole groups of characters, URW developed a graphic editor and also a large number of programs to make fonts digitally available for different typesetting systems.
In addition to software development, URW began to build up its own font library. This began in 1975 through the collaboration with Letraset and later with the International Typeface Corporation (ITC for short), which Peter Karow offered, the final drawings by the ITC designers, which at the time of phototypesetting by each individual typesetting system manufacturer for their respective programs had to be photographed and processed, digitized once, and the reproducible templates cut on plotters available to all manufacturers. It was not until the DTP that these digital data, initially intended for analog use, acquired a new meaning. URW therefore continuously expanded its digital font library.
In 1995 URW had to file for bankruptcy. In 1996, former employees continued the font development under the name URW ++ Design & Development GmbH. URW ++ took over copyrights and trademarks for fonts and software from the former URW.
The years 1995 to 2015 were characterized by establishing the company even more firmly on the international market as a font foundry . In 2016, URW ++ holds the rights to thousands of original fonts, including increasingly non-Latin fonts. The long and close contact with Chinese and Japanese companies, for which URW developed special software for processing the Kanji characters, is particularly important.
URW is involved in the development of the corporate fonts for Daimler AG , Siemens AG and Deutsche Telekom AG .
In 2016 URW ++ was sold to Global Graphics and renamed URW Type Foundry GmbH in 2018. The sole managing director of URW Type Foundry was Peter Rosenfeld until 2019 and Christofer Linusson since 2020.