VEB Typoart was the only type foundry

Type foundry

A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers...

 of East Germany. It was a state-owned enterprise ("Volkseigener Betrieb

Volkseigener Betrieb

The Volkseigener Betrieb was the legal form of industrial enterprise in East Germany...

") located in Dresden

Dresden

Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

. The foundry's most influential art director

Art director

The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....

s were Herbert Thannhäuser and Albert Kapr.

History

VEB Typoart was created by the government of the German Democratic Republic

German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

 in 1948 through a merger of several nationalised type foundries, including Schelter & Giesecke (1945) and Ludwig Wagner AG

L. Wagner Type Foundry

The Ludwig Wagner Type Foundry was established in 1902 in Leipzig after the veteran punch cutter Ludwig Wagner took over the small foundry Gundelach & Ebersbach in 1901. The beginning of his modern type production and the extension of his business happened before 1914. The large manufacturing...

 (1960). It was subordinated to Zentrag, a state enterprise coordinating all GDR printing activity. Typoart's principal mission was to create typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

s for Eastern Germany and other Eastern Bloc

Eastern bloc

The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

 countries. It was frequently ordered to plagiarise

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

 Western typefaces that Zentrag could not afford to license.

In the course of German reunification

German reunification

German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...

, 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:

External links

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