URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose.

Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families.

Zapf’s intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc.

However, we realized later on, that URW Grotesk is very well suited for multi media applications on screen.