Founded by Thomas Schostok and Stefan Claudius in 2002, Cape Arcona Type Foundry is headquartered at Cape Arcona in Germany. The foundry and studio was established as an independent digital type foundry that offers retail fonts along with bespoke type designs and logo creation for its clientele.
Thomas and Stefan have built a type foundry that revels in the unique and unexpected, preferring to think outside the box in favor of new and yet-to-be-imagined typography. They strive to make each new type design better than the last, and with backgrounds in art, graphic design, and typography, they’ve led Cape Arcona Type Foundry to great success over the last 17 years.
When they’re not hard at work in the studio, the pair often hit the road to teach workshops and hold lectures on type design. Stefan teaches typography and conceptual design at universities in Essen, Dortmund, and Hamburg in Germany. He also co-runs a graphic design studio, Sichtvermerk, with Kathrin Roussel.
Thomas has a background in web and print design. His artwork has been on display in international exhibitions and he has always had a profound love for the type design. Together with Stefan, the future of the foundry is in very capable hands and we’re sure the future holds nothing but great things.
One of Cape Arcona Type Foundry’s most recent releases through YouWorkForThem is CA Saygon Text, a variant of their original CA Saygon designed to offer a more comfortable reading experience for long-form text.
With CA Saygon Text, Cape Arcona Type Foundry wanted to utilize the basic shapes and proportions from its predecessor, while adapting them to improve their legibility and flow for publishing applications. The sans serif letters appear larger due to to their higher x-height, and the line spacing was also decreased through the use of smaller ascenders and a lowered cap height. To further improve its design, they chose to use right angles on letters like f and t, two characters that typically end in curves. It’s a fresh take on their architecture, but one that lends a more contemporary aesthetic to the family.
One unique and rather unusual feature of CA Saygon Text lies in the built-in styles offered. By default, Helvetica style presents with double-story a and g characters. In Futura style, designers will have a single-story a and a double-story g. Franklin offers a double-story a and triple-story g. By far, however, Cape Arcona Type Foundry’s favorite style is the Cape style, featuring a single-story a and a triple-story g, a rare combination. For something a little more progressive, Flat style offers right angles a, g, and y for a more sharpened approach.
The CA Saygon Text family is available in Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Extrabold, with corresponding italics for each. This range of weights makes it well suited to headlines, subheadings, editorials, publishing, marketing materials, logos, letterhead, corporate communications, white papers, infographics, presentations, product packaging and inserts, website designs, and mobile applications.
CA Saygon Text offers several additional features through OpenType, including fractions, scientific inferiors, subscript, superscript, tabular figures, slashed zero, stylistic alternates, and contextual alternates for greater versatility. The family’s multilingual support is incredibly generous, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Afrikaans, Igbo Onwu, Basic Greek, and Basic Cyrillic for exceptionally far-reaching global accessibility.
Cape Arcona Type Foundry currently offers 19 products through YouWorkForThem. Their body of work so far includes serifs, sans serifs, scripts and display fonts to suit projects of all kinds. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their type designs and if you love what you see, bookmark it so you can check back often for new releases!
