Font Designer - Jürgen Weltin

Jürgen Weltin was born on May 8th, 1969 in Constance. After schooling and swimming a lot in the Lake of Constance he worked in a publishing house before he started to study graphic design at the Technical College in Würzburg. After an apprenticeship in design company Stankowski + Duschek and after one term at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design he graduated in Würzburg under Reinhard Haus from Linotype presenting the beginning of the new typeface Linotype Finnegan.™.

Then he worked as a graphic designer in an industrial firm being responsible for their corporate design. In his spare time he revised and extended the typeface family of Linotype Finnegan.

In September 1997 he joined Freda Sack and David Quay in their typefoundry "The Foundry" in London, where he was involved with many of The Foundry’s type development projects and their production process, including Foundry Gridnik and Foundry Form.

In collaboration with Freda and David, who have been a valuable source of inspiration and creative input, he designed many corporate typefaces (like the constructed alphabet for the new identity of the Odeon cinemas) and numerous logotypes for big international corporations.

In 1999 Jürgen Weltin has been awarded with a D&AD Silver Award for his typeface design for the Yellow Pages directory which he started in February 1998 and finished after only three months time while he was still working at The Foundry. In his sparetime during two years in corporate design bureau Stankowski+ Duschek, he was working on new typefaces including a new set of pictograms for the signage of the new Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich.

With his first typeface Linotype Finnegan Jürgen Weltin tried to create a modern sanserif as a text face providing easy and comfortable legibility in large-scale text setting.

His typeface Yellow, an exclusive typeface of British Telecommunications plc. for the Yellow Pages directory, also follows the internal structure of humanist renaissance typefaces carried out in a contemporary design for the special needs demanded in a phone book directory.

The brief for the typeface was to be extremely economic with space, to be clear and highly readable at very small sizes and to be used with negative leading.

To achieve this Jürgen Weltin designed a sanserif distinguished by simplicity of design and condensed letterforms with a very large height of the lowercase letters.

By drawing the bold weight first the opportunity was given to investigate how condensed the design of the letterforms actually could be. As condensed letterforms tend to have a vertical appearance obstructive to reading speed, the stroke design got a slight calligraphic flow to emphasize the movement to the right thus helping to lead the eye along the line.

To undergo inktraps by drawing deep cut-ins where vertical and horizontal strokes are joining (a method used for high-speed printing on low-quality short-life paper) the horizontal strokes were treated in a radical and straight way. Through the sharp movement of the horizontals away from the vertical stem a lot more white space around the joining strokes was gained. This treatment is essential of the design and its functionality which also allowed to keep the symbols very open enhances a lucky combination of legibility and technical restraints.


In 2002, Jürgen Weltin designed the font Balega™. Balega is a display font from the new www.typematters.de

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