URW Grotesk is a large

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

family designed by Hermann Zapf for

URW URW may refer to: *Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield *Union of Russian Workers *UnReal World, survival video game *Unrestricted Warfare, military strategy *Urawa Station is a junction passenger railway station located in Urawa-ku, Saitama, Japan, operat ...

in the mid-1980s. URW Grotesk is a sans-serif of mixed design, with influences both of geometric sans-serifs of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Futura and Erbar, as well as "grotesque" and "humanist" sans-serifs. Elements related to the geometric model include the "single-storey" letter 'a', based on a circle. Other elements are less purely geometric, and more based on classic serif typefaces, for example the 't' with a curl to bottom right and an angled stroke terminal, unlike Futura's 't' composed of two simple cross-strokes. Some ideas for the design germinated from "Magnus", a 1950s design for Linotype that did not reach release. Starting from Zapf's original designs, URW created an extremely large range of weights and widths by computerised interpolation and extrapolation. Florian Hardwig's obituary for Zapf described it as "not a typical design for him, utterly uncalligraphic...but it functioned wonderfully, of course." It is the primary typeface used by the

University of Nebraska at Omaha The University of Nebraska Omaha (Omaha or UNO) is a public research university in Omaha, Nebraska. Founded in 1908 by faculty from the Omaha Presbyterian Theological Seminary as a private non-sectarian college, the university was originally kno ...

. The design was originally intended for

Axel Springer Axel Cäsar Springer (2 May 1912 – 22 September 1985) was a German publisher and founder of what is now Axel Springer SE, the largest media publishing firm in Europe. By the early 1960s his print titles dominated the West German daily press ma ...

publications. Zapf designed a serif companion font at the same time as part of the same (ultimately abandoned) redesign project, URW Antiqua.

References

{{notelist, 30em Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1983 Sans-serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Hermann Zapf