page_title: Optima
section_title: Optima nova (2002)
hierarchical_section_title: Optima / Optima nova (2002)
context_page_description: Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, Germany and released in 1958.
  Though classified as a sans-serif, Optima has a subtle swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic serif. Optima was inspired by classical Roman capitals and the stonecarving on Renaissance-period tombstones Zapf saw in Florence on a 1950 holiday to Italy.
  Zapf intended Optima to be a typeface that could serve for both body text and titling. To prove its versatility, Zapf set his entire book About Alphabets in the regular weight. Zapf retained an interest in the design, collaborating on variants and expansions into his eighties.
context_section_description: Optima nova is a redesign of the original font family, designed by Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashi. The new family contains seven font weights, adding light, demi, and heavy font weights, but removing extra black weight. Medium weight is readjusted to between medium and bold weights in the old family scale. Glyph sets are expanded to include Adobe CE and Latin Extended characters, with light to bold weight fonts supporting proportional lining figures, old style figures, and small caps.
  The initial and most common release of Optima, like many sans-serif fonts, has an oblique style instead of an italic: the shapes are merely tilted to the right. In Optima nova, this is replaced by a true italic. (In interviews, Zapf has said that this was his original goal from the beginning, but the need to release Optima quickly forced him to settle for an oblique.)
  Even in Roman fonts, letters such as Q, a, f are redesigned. The overall bounding boxes were widened in Optima nova.
  Reviewing it, John Berry wrote that "its 'color' on the page comes much closer to that of the original metal version than any of the earlier photo/digital versions did" but that "ends of the strokes in the letters 'a', 'c', and 's' flare much more dramatically than they ever did in the older Optima — so much so that these letters almost look as though they have serifs...It’s a subtle difference, but it’s disturbing if you’re used to the understated elegance of Optima’s letterforms."
caption: A specimen image of Optima Nova showing its italic, stylistic alternates and condensed weights