URW Type Foundry GmbH is a font developer based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate fonts and the development of non-Latin fonts. Since May 2020, it is owned by Monotype Imaging.
Today
Today, URW holds rights to thousands of original fonts, including increasingly non-Latin fonts. Of particular importance are the established relationships with Chinese and Japanese companies, for which URW developed a special software for editing the Kanji characters. Among others, URW is involved in the development of corporate typefaces for Daimler AG, Siemens AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, General Motors and Activision Blizzard.
History
URW was founded in 1971 by Gerhard Rubow and Jürgen Weber as a management consultancy, Rubow Weber GmbH. Soon Peter Karow joined as a third partner and later the company was renamed URW Software & Type GmbH. In the following years, products were developed in the graphic industry: typesetting and layout programs for publishers for the use of Digiset and software for image processing in the Hell-Chromacom system of Hell. In 1983 URW developed a system for cutting different lettering and figures into colored, self-adhesive foils for outdoor advertising. In 1975 Ikarus was introduced, a program that can digitally store the contours of a letter together with all necessary information for electronic typesetting, and became a standard in the type industry. For the revision and manipulation of single letters or whole groups of characters, URW developed a graphical editor and a multitude of programs to make fonts digitally available for different typesetting systems. In addition to software development, URW began to build its own font library. This started in 1975 in cooperation with Letraset and later with the International Typeface Corporation, which offered Peter Karow the possibility to digitize the final artwork of the ITC designers, which had to be photographed and prepared by each individual typesetting system manufacturer for his respective program at the time of phototypesetting, and to make the repro-ready originals cut on plotters available to all manufacturers. It was only through DTP that these digital data, initially intended for analogue use, took on a new meaning. URW therefore continuously expanded its digital font library. URW also became known for making some of its fonts available to the open source community as free fonts. URW was involved in a 1995 lawsuit with Monotype Corporation for cloning its fonts and naming them with a name starting with the same three letters. As typeface shapes themselves cannot be copyrighted in the United States, the lawsuit centered on trademark infringement. A US court decided that Monotype's trademarks were "fanciful" and did not have descriptive value of the actual products. However it also decided that URW was deliberately confusing the public because "the purloining of the first part of a well-known trademark and the appending of it to a worthless suffix is a method of trademark poaching long condemned by the courts." The court issued an injunction preventing URW from using its chosen names. In 1995 URW had to file for bankruptcy. After the bankruptcy Peter Rosenfeld founded URW++ on March 1st 1995. On January 1st 1996 he transferred the sole proprietorship, together with Dr. Jürgen Willrodt, Jochen Lau and Svend Bang, into a GmbH. The years from 1995 to 2015 were characterized by establishing the company even more strongly on the international market as a font foundry. URW++ was sold to Global Graphics plc in 2016 and renamed URW Type Foundry GmbH in 2018. Until 2019, Peter Rosenfeld was the sole managing director of URW Type Foundry, and since 2020 Christofer Linusson has been the sole managing director. URW Type Foundry was sold to Monotype Imaging in May 2020.
