Robert Hunter Middleton drew the original design of Stellar for the Ludlow Typograph Company in Chicago. Work began in the late 1920s, when Middleton was asked to create a sans serif type family to compete with European imports of Futura and Kabel. Stellar was Middleton's attempt to raise the ante. Where Futura and Kabel were geometric in design and monotone in weight, Stellar was based on roman character proportions and stroke weighs were stressed. In the late 1990s, Dave Farey took on the task of reviving the Stellar design. While Ludlow cut Stellar in a full range of point sizes, the family was limited to just a roman and bold design. Farey's revival is twice as large a family. It ranges from a very light called Stellar Nova to a very bold called Zeta In between are Lyra and Epsilon.

Erbar or Erbar Grotesk, designed by Jakob Erbar (Ludwig & Mayer) in the early 1920s, is a truly key design from a historical viewpoint. None other than Paul Renner studied Erbar and used this knowledge in the design of his famous Futura. Erbar is a beautiful constructive Grotesk perfectly mirroring the Zeitgeist of the 1920s. The newly expanded Erbar family of URW++ comes in nine styles, of which seven have been digitally remastered recently in URW's design studio (light, book, medium, bold, italic, bold italic).