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ABOUT

Digital Type Company (DTC) [Volker Schnebel]

Volker Schnebel is a German type designer, b. 1950. He started out in 1977 at URW. In 1981, he was consultant for Compugraphic, where he developed 800 bitmap fonts for DEC. With Fritz Renzo Heinze, he founded the Digital Type Company in 1985 in Hamburg. He digitized the 50 basic type families of Monotype, including Arial and Times. He developed the Latin portion of Hiragino Mincho. From 1990 until 1993, he developed 1000 Gravurfonts for Scripta, Paris. After that, he joined URW++, where he is type director and chief type designer. He also is a type designer for Profonts.

Catalog of Volker Schnebel's typefaces.

He designed Kronos-Trilogie, DTC Hermes, Imperial and Joker DTC (now at URW++). He digitized Hunziker's Siemens family, and made custom type for Swiss Re and ZF. He created FAZ-Fraktur (with G.G. Lange, at URW, the house font of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung based on Fette Gotisch; well, Times Ten and Eighteen are the other house fonts of that newspaper) and Biblica (with Kurt Weidemann). He created the Handelsblatt newspaper headline font and corporate type for Swiss Re, ZF, Fujitsu, A1 Easy, and other companies.

At MyFonts, one can buy Black Market DTC, Hermes DTC and Imperial DTC as well as the SoftMaker families Dirty, Funky, Rough, which come in a total of 37 mostly grungy styles and are dated 1999.

In 2010, he created Linda (hand-printed, Profonts), Marita Pro (Profonts), Manuel Pro (Profonts) and Martin (a sans; Profonts).

In 2011, he published Justus Pro at URW, a modern Egyptienne with a humanist touch.

In 2014, Profonts published his text typeface Martin Pro.

In 2008, Volker Schnebel designed all the fonts in Nimbus Sans ME, the Middle East range of Nimbus Sans, including Arabic, Farsi, Cyrillic and Hebrew. It was published by URW Global at MyFonts in 2016.

In 2016, URW++ published Schnebel's 48-style typeface family Kronos Sans Pro and Kronos Sans ME (covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic), and his 48-style URW DIN. Still in 2016, URW publised Bernd Möllenstädt's text typeface Classica Pro, which was unfinished when Möllenstädt died in 2013. The missing styles and details were filled in under the guidance of Volker Schnebel.

Typefaces from 2017: URW Form (80 styles, based on Futura), and Schnebel Sans Pro (48 styles), actually designed in 2016, and perhaps his crowning achievement. He writes: It took me 12 years to bring this extensive font family to completion. A lot has been changed, transformed, peeled and developed in all those years. For many of my projects I used it as my quarry and so it might have become something like a synthesis of all my imaginations and experiences. To me Schnebel Sans represents the optimal design of a contemporary grotesque that perfectly unites dynamics with statics. For copy text the typefaces are very legible, neutrally and remain in the background, but despite this generate the necessary tension when set as headlines. It is available as a Pro Font, containing West, East Greek, and Cyrillic or as the Schnebel Sans ME, also containing Arabic and Hebrew. It is perhaps a renaming of Kronos Sans Pro.

In 2018, he published the 36-style family Schnebel Slab Pro at URW.

In 2019, Volker Schnebel (URW) and Arlette Boutros joined forces and published URW DIN Arabic.

Catalog of DTC's typefaces.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Digital Type Company (DTC)
 [Designer info]
Monotype link
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ German type scene ⦿ Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ DIN ⦿