page_title: Hermann Zapf
section_title: Type design
hierarchical_section_title: Hermann Zapf / Type design
context_page_description: Hermann Zapf was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino.
context_section_description: Zapf's career in type design spanned the three most recent stages of printing: hot metal composition, phototypesetting (also called cold type), and digital typesetting. His two most famous typefaces, Palatino and Optima, were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively. Palatino was designed in conjunction with August Rosenberger, with careful attention to detail. It was named after the 16th-century Italian writing master Giambattista Palatino. It became better known after it became one of the core 35 PostScript fonts in 1984, bundled with virtually all PostScript devices from laser printers to imagesetters. Optima, a flared sans-serif, was released by Stempel in 1958. Zapf intended the design to bridge serifs and sans serifs and to be suitable for both headings and continuous passages of text.
  Zapf's work reached into a range of genres. While Palatino and Optima are warm, organic designs inspired by Italian Renaissance calligraphy, printing and stonecarving, he also designed a number of serif text fonts, such as Melior, in the more austere, classical style, following the work of the great German neoclassical printer Justus Erich Walbaum. His sans serif series URW Grotesk was designed for newspaper use and presents a wide range of widths and weights, reminiscent of geometric sans serif fonts like Futura but in a more eccentric style. Several of his more geometric designs, like both of these, make use of superellipses, squarish designs incorporating a slight curve. Opinion on Zapf's later designs has not always been favourable: Maxim Zhukov remembered his contemporary Adrian Frutiger commenting, with reference to URW Grotesk, that Zapf was "not a sans-serif man" at a conference in 1990, and graphic designer Dan Margulis commented on a retrospective that "he participated in the 1980s trend toward faces with very large x-heights and tight letterfits; his major works in that genre, Zapf Book and Zapf International, have deservedly been forgotten... you would have to say that his historical standing will be based on the first ten years of his professional career."
  Zapf's later releases for Linotype in the 1990s and 2000s, often created in collaboration with Akira Kobayashi, were radical reformations of his previous work, often removing compromises that had been necessary in the manufacture of metal type. In this period he created Palatino Sans, a more informal modulated sans serif than Optima.
  Zapf's typefaces have been widely copied, usually, but not always against his will. The best-known example may be Monotype's Book Antiqua, which was included in Microsoft Office and is often considered an imitation of Palatino. In 1993, Zapf resigned from ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) over what he viewed as its hypocritical attitude toward unauthorized copying by prominent ATypI members. At a 1994 conference of the Raster Imaging and Digital Typography association in Darmstadt, Germany, a panel discussion on digital typefaces and designers' rights strongly criticized the alleged plagiarism of Zapf's Palatino, while several Microsoft attendees listened in the audience. In 1999, Microsoft worked with Zapf and Linotype to develop a new, authorized version of Palatino for Microsoft, called Palatino Linotype.
  Sometimes, however, Zapf worked with a font maker to make new versions of his existing typefaces created for another company. For example, in the 1980s Zapf worked with Bitstream to make versions of many of his prior typefaces, including Palatino, Optima and Melior, all with "Zapf" in their new names.
caption: Melior, inspired by Didone typography of around 1800, incorporating the superellipse as a design motif