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Volker Küster

German type designer, b. Wernigerode im Harz, 1941, d. Kleve, 2025. He was a professor of typography at the University of Essen. His fonts can be found at URW. He designed the Today Sans Serif family at Scangraphic from 1985-1988, as well as Neue Luthersche Fraktur (1983-1985, now available at Elsner+Flake; design based on a typeface from the Luther-Egenolffschen Schriftgiesserei, 1708). From 1984 until 1989, he was one of the main type designers at Scangraphic. In 2011, Ralph M. Unger created a signage face, Brocken, which he claims was inspired by Volker Küster's work from the 1960s. In 2015, Elsner & Flake published an update of Today Sans, Today Sans Now.

Obituary by Natscha Dell.

Albert-Jan Pool wrote in November 2025: Volker Küster was a master of forms and their proportions. When we first met in the summer of 1985, this wasn't immediately apparent to me. It was at the ATypI working seminar in Hamburg. I didn't notice him right away because he hardly ever left the nearby Scangraphic type studio. Late into the evening, he was busy realising the dreams (and nightmares) of Bernd Holthusen, the mastermind behind the then revolutionary Scantext typesetting system. During the seminar, it turned out that we were both working on a new sans serif font. We agreed that, for better legibiity, it should follow the dynamic form principle. To my astonishment, Volker's Today Sans Serif broke all the rules I had set for myself. Each of its characters had its own special features, while I focused on uniformity. Although we were pursuing the same goal, our results were completely different. Eighteen months later, I became his assistant in the Scangraphic type studio. When he began teaching in 1989, first at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Armgartstrasse (now HAW), and later in Essen, I became his successor. Building on Volker Küster's work, my new colleague Jelle Bosma and I were able to bring around 1,000 typefaces from the Scangraphic Digital Type Collection to market in the then new PostScript Type1 font format. Volker had done a great job ... In 2016, Birgit and I visited his exhibition at the Galerie Amalienpark in Berlin and got to know his free artistic works. A kaleidoscopic variety of geometric shapes roamed around, but Volker had them all in hand. With Volker Küster, we are losing one of our old masters.

Albert-Jan Pool's assessment of Today Sans Serif [PDF] in Robert Norton's 1993 book, Types Best Remembered, Types Best Forgotten.

Parts of Natascha Dell's piece on Küster: Volker Küster was born in 1941 in Wernigerode in the Harz Mountains and grew up there. After an apprenticeship as a typesetter in Wernigerode, he studied graphic design at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Schöneweide until 1964 and typography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (HGB) under Albert Kapr until 1967. Here he discovered the field that would occupy him for a large part of his life: the design of and with type. Following his studies, he obtained a teaching position as a trainee and assistant at the HGB. For the VEB Typoart Dresden type foundry, where Albert Kapr was artistic director from 1963 to 1977, Volker Küster was responsible for advertising and typeface design. Until 1984, he worked as a freelance and award-winning book designer (most beautiful books). In 1984, he left East Germany for Hamburg, where from 1985 to 1989 he was responsible for the type program of the former phototypesetting manufacturer Scangraphic as Type Director and head of the type design studio. There, Albert-Jan Pool--now a successful type designer himself and creator of FF DIN---was Volker Küster's assistant from 1987 to 1989. It was here, among other typefaces, that the typeface with which his name is now inextricably linked was created: Today Sans Serif, a humanist sans-serif typeface, which was released in 1988. At a time when the transition from phototypesetting to digital typesetting systems fundamentally changed the world of design, Volker Küster created a type family that embodied this transformation. The typeface follows in the tradition of European sans-serif typefaces, whose open forms offer excellent readability. Its proportions are balanced, and the letterforms are well-differentiated. Volker Küster created Today as an entirely digital typeface family in 12 weights. It is and is considered one of the most successful dynamic sans-serif typefaces worldwide (100 best typefaces, FontShop). In 1988, he was first offered a position at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, and in the following year, the University of Essen was able to recruit Volker Küster as a university professor for graphic design, writing and typography for the design department. Volker Küster was not only an outstanding type and book designer, he was also a passionate teacher. He took his role seriously and approached this task with pragmatism and patience. He understood typography, among other things, as a means of teaching design concepts and an understanding of form. Several generations of typographers and type designers were influenced by Volker Küster.

Stephan Fiedler, a book designer and former student, wrote: Volker Küster was an important figure for me during my design studies in Essen, as he instilled in me a conscious awareness of typography as a tool for conveying content, not as an end in itself. It's a great shame that we never met again after graduation; he was always appreciative and open to my unconventional path.

Karsten Lücke, a type designer and former student, added: He wasn't one of those typography teachers who turn their students into mere imitators. You won't find a Küster school of thought here. He observed what individual students were doing and offered them constructive feedback. Quietly, critically. A typeface design had to have substance, independent substance; otherwise, he suggested trying something else. Perhaps that's why he emphasized learning to write before designing typefaces, and that a typeface design should be based on one's own handwriting.

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