VAG Rounded, a variation on 19^th century grotesque sans-serif designs, also known as VAG Rundschrift, which means ‘round writing’ in German, is a font designed for Volkswagen AG in 1979 by Gerry Barney and refined by other creative and art directors of Volkswagen AG. The distinctiveness of the typeface would be that the terminal of every stroke is rounded and in the days the typeface was designed the rounded typeface didn’t exist.

When Volkswagen bought Auto Union in 1964, and the dealer organization of Volkswagen and Audi, which was the main brand of Auto Union, merged in the early 1970s, Volkswagen AG had to re-think their future strategy: bring all their organization, services and activities all under one branded umbrella.

At the time of the merger, Volkswagen was using Futura and Audi was using Times for their corporate typeface. For the fairness to the both parties the new typeface should not be sans serif or serif as the Futura or the Times and as rounded typeface didn’t exist that time it had to be designed. The design had to be rendered by hand until the design was finalised and perfected on the computer. In 1978, Volkswagen AG began trading as V.A.G using VAG rounded font for all their graphic materials except its logo because of the font was not available throughout the world at the time.

Today the VAG Rounded is available widely licensed by Adobe Systems in four different stroke weight, VAG Rounded Std Thin, VAG Rounded Std Light, VAG Rounded Std Bold and VAG Rounded Std Black where former is lighter than the latter respectively. Because of its rounded termini, the font adds the feature of soft and friendliness, therefore it is being widely used by companies when designing brand for their corporate image. For example, in Australia, Big W has changed their logo from being written in Helvetica Neue to VAG Rounded and Dick Smith use the font in their advertising materials.

Also with beginning of the Web 2.0, it is becoming a trend to use rounded fonts like VAG Rounded for its simplicity and friendliness of the web design and now almost becoming a cliché of web designs. The most familiar place for us designers to find the font would be on the keyboard of Apple MacBook series. Apple Inc. applied the typeface on their keyboard for notebook computers since 1999.

In comparison to Helvetica Rounded which is one of many rounded fonts being utilised today along with VAG Rounded, Vag Rounded has more simplified strokes making it easier to read and when it is bolded, VAG Rounded is not too heavy like Helvetica Rounded, which is better when enlarged to be used for headlines and titles.

References

http://www.fonts.com/family/1571/vag-rounded

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAG_Rounded

http://forums.kombiclub.com/showthread.php?t=27140