About

The wonderful world of Cape Arcona

The Cape Arcona Type Foundry is a type foundry based in Mülheim/Essen, Germany, run by Stefan Claudius and Thomas Schostok. We started it in 2002 to publish fonts we designed for Beast, a legendary PDF magazine. Our goal: typefaces with a non-conformist personality.

Over the years, the field of business expanded from individual typeface design to custom font production, corporate, and logo design and complex text-font families. This is the kind of work we love: Thinking beyond the ordinary, imagining better worlds and better fonts.

The Cape Arcona Type Foundry Headquarter since 2002
The Arcona island offers dramatic cliffs and sweet beaches such as El Arcona, Puntarcona or Point d’Arcona. Besides fonts, tourism is one of the major resources of the little country.

A life between font and fun

The Cape Arcona Type Foundry has its headquarter at the wonderful Cape Arcona on the Arcona Island. It was hushed for hundreds of years until we settled in an imaginary country on an island between Europe and America, exactly where we feel home. To combine democracy with monarchy, we declared them King and President. Within the borders of the country, we abolished money and introduced the production of typefaces.

For hundreds of years Cape Arcona was a melting pot for the most different cultures, but the main influences came from England, America, Spain, Germany, and France. Wherever people felt dissatisfied with their countries, they immigrated to Cape Arcona and found a friendly climate, nice folks and a peaceful place to live.


The people behind

Stefan Claudius

He is the “President” of Cape Arcona. Besides designing typefaces, he is and was teaching typography and conceptional design at the universities of Essen, Dortmund, and Hamburg. He is running the graphic design studio called Sichtvermerk.
Visit his work at www.sichtvermerk.com

Thomas Schostok

He is the “King” of Cape Arcona. Started with graphic design at the beginning of the 90s. Still focusing on web and print design, as an artist Thomas Schostok also had international exhibitions with his artworks. His love for typography can always admire in his art and design work.
Visit his work at www.ths.works

We just love cruising around in the motorboat. It's electric, of course.

Source: Wikipedia

Historical awareness

For the sake of political correctness, we would like to state that we are NOT named after the luxury liner “Cap Arcona”. The ship was named after Cape Arkona on the island of Rügen in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The thing is, that this luxury liner was used by the Nazis for transports of war prisoners. In 1945, when the WWII was nearly over, the RAF bombed the “Cap Arcona” together with two other ships and caused (together with the German soldiers who didn’t allow the prisoners to leave the ship) the death of hundreds of prisoners of their nationality.
This is a tragedy, and we would like to assure you that we didn’t have this in mind when giving our type foundry the name Cape Arcona.


Cape Television


The Cape Arcona Love Band

We are also on tour all the time with our Band. Please download our best song Hey Girl as MP3.

Declaration of Normality

The King and the President from the Cape Arcona Type Foundry giving their “Declaration of Normality”. 23-February-2009 http://vimeo.com/3334538

Coffee and Fonts

The King and the President from the Cape Arcona Type Foundry showing their secrets of how they develop new typefaces. Filmed in stunning ‘Cape Vision’. 30-January-2008 http://vimeo.com/1323241

Press Conference (20-March-2006): «We make to try to make everything this way because we thought that it makes us richer» The President and the King announcing the new website of the Cape Arcona Type Foundry & new fonts.