The overall bounding boxes were widened in Optima nova. (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.)Įven in Roman fonts, letters such as Q, a, f are redesigned. In Optima nova, this is replaced by a true italic. 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. 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. Medium weight is readjusted to between medium and bold weights in the old family scale. The new family contains 7 font weights, adding light, demi, and heavy font weights, but removing extra black weight. Optima nova is a redesign of the original font family, designed by Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashi. It is a variant designed by Matthew Carter, based closely on Optima Medium. It is a Greek variant designed by Matthew Carter, based on sketches from Hermann Zapf. For Optima nova (discussed below) Zapf decided to create a new true italic with a greater slant angle.Īt the same time as the late development of Optima, Zapf was also working on a non-modulated sans for Linotype, to be named Magnus and intended to compete with Gill Sans. Optima's sloped version was originally an oblique or sloped roman, in which the letters do not take on handwriting characteristics. Optima is however quite restrained in stroke width variation more display-oriented predecessors such as Britannic show far more differentiation in stroke width than Optima does. Shaw also suggests the little-known 1948 design Romann Antiqua, as well as Stellar by Robert Hunter Middleton as predecessors, and notes the existence of Pascal by José Mendoza y Almeida (1962) as a design with a similar set of influences. Optima was originally targeted by Stempel's Walter Cunz as a competitor to Ludwig & Mayer's Colonia design, which has not been digitised. The design style has been intermittently popular since the late nineteenth century Optima is one of the most lastingly popular examples of the genre. Optima is an example of a modulated-stroke sans-serif, a design type where the strokes are variable in width. Optima’s design follows humanist lines its capitals (like those of Palatino, Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax and Carol Twombly's Trajan) originate from the classic Roman monumental capital model, reflecting a reverence for Roman capitals as an ideal form. Zapf wrote later in his life of his preference for Optima over all of his other typefaces, but he also mentioned “a father should not have a favorite among his daughters.” Structure If it had been up to Zapf, Optima would have been named New Roman, but the marketing staff insisted that it be named Optima. It was released to the public at an exhibition in Düsseldorf in that same year. Optima was first manufactured as a foundry version in 1958 by Stempel of Frankfurt, and by Mergenthaler in America shortly thereafter. The development of Optima took place over the period 1955-1958. However, the curved lines of the stems of each letter result from technical considerations of type manufacturing rather than purely esthetic considerations.” The proportions of Optima Roman are now in the Golden Section: lowercase x-height equalling the minor and ascenders-descenders the major. Thus, too many German types have ascenders which are too long and descenders which are too short. Zapf states “ This base line is not ideal for a roman, as it was designed for the high x-height of the Fraktur and Textura letters. Optima is the first German typeface not based on the standard baseline alignment that had been used up until this point in time. “He thereupon changed the proportions of the lowercase, and by means of photography, he tested the suitability of the design for continuous reading application.” Zapf designed the capital letters of Optima after the inscriptions on the Trajan Column (A.D. Upon the suggestion of Monroe Wheeler of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Zapf decided to adapt his typeface to be used as a book type.
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