Volker Schnebel has enjoyed a long and illustrious career in type design. Even before he was employed by URW++ in Hamburg, Germany, Volker spent decades working in the field of type design and font digitization. He co-founded Digital Type Company in 1985 and his work involved digitizing dozens of basic type families for Monotype, including Times and Arial. At URW++, Volker works as type director and chief type designer, sharing an impressive catalog of type designs with the world. For him, the field of type design is far more than just a way to put food on the table; it plays a pivotal role in sustaining artistic expression.
One of Volker’s latest releases with URW++ is URW DIN, an unusually semi-condensed adaptation of traditional DIN fonts. The history of the DIN font families is an interesting one that dates back to the early-1980s when URW’s signature type digitization software, Ikarus, released a version named “Signus,” a program that met the specific needs of sign making applications. The earliest DIN fonts played an enormous role in the industry, particularly for traffic signs, because of their simplicity and high degree of legibility.
The semi-condensed proportions of URW DIN make it appropriate for a vast number of design applications. All facets of publishing, in print but particularly in digital formats, will benefit from the remarkable legibility of this type design. Even in small point, URW DIN maintains its readability so mobile applications, business cards, and the finest print on documents will convey their messages with clarity. The versatility of URW DIN adapts to a multitude of other projects as well, including corporate communications, letterhead, editorials, headlines, advertising, labels, and product packaging.
URW DIN is comprised of 48 fonts; 24 weights with corresponding italics for each make this font a true workhorse that provides designers with substantial flexibility. A total of 963 glyphs offer a comprehensive list of attributes, including capitals to small caps, case sensitive forms, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, oldstyle figures, lining figures, tabular figures, small caps, fractions, numerators, and denominators. Ample multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Igbo Onwu.
URW DIN is on sale for 50% off of its regular price now through January 22, 2017. If you love the style of URW DIN, you should check out the URW Transit Type Collection, a selection of fifteen URW++ fonts grouped together by YouWorkForThem. The URW Transit Type Collection celebrates the spirit of the open road and provides a savings of 45% off of the regular price if each of the fonts were purchased individually.
URW++ currently offers more than 450 products through YouWorkForThem. URW++ is a world leader in typography so visit their extensive portfolio to see their prodigious body of work and purchase your favorites today.
