VEB Typoart

VEB Typoart

Former type	Volkseigener Betrieb
Industry	Type foundry
Founded	1948
Defunct	1989
Headquarters	Dresden, Germany

VEB Typoart was the only type foundry of East Germany. It was a state-owned enterprise ("Volkseigener Betrieb") located in Dresden. The foundry's most influential art directors were Herbert Thannhäuser and Albert Kapr.

History

VEB Typoart was created by the government of the German Democratic Republic in 1948 through a merger of several nationalised type foundries, including Schelter & Giesecke (1945) and Ludwig Wagner AG (1960). It was subordinated to Zentrag, a state enterprise coordinating all GDR printing activity. Typoart's principal mission was to create typefaces for Eastern Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries. It sometimes produced clones Western typefaces that Zentrag could not afford to license.

In the course of German reunification, Typoart was privatised as Typoart GmbH in 1989 and went bankrupt in 1995. The copyright status of its typefaces remained uncertain, and some of them have been reissued in digital form by other type foundries.

Typefaces

Typoart's typefaces included:

2

References

• Myfonts.com entry for VEB Typoart

External links

• Typowiki entry for VEB Typoart (with a full list of typefaces)
• Typoart-Freunde

• Jaspert (p.83) gives the date of 1922 for this type despite the foundry only coming into existence more than twenty years later. Perhaps this is a legacy type from one of the absorbed foundries.