| Date: 1958 Designer:
Hermann Zapf Foundry:
Stempel / Linotype Location:
Frankfurt, Germany Current equivalent:
Linotype Optima See also:
Optima Next, BT Zapf Humanist 601, CG Omega, Oracle
Technologies:
Metal (foundry)
Metal (machine)
Photosetting
Postscript
Opentype | | Famous for:
The first type design to explore the boundary between sans and serif forms. Applications: Book Publishing & General Purpose Text Setting Ubiquity:
Very widely used. Category:
Sans Serif Humanist Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Sans | | Design history:
Hermann Zapf's Optima prefigured ideas found in later designs – Rotis, Stone and other hybrid families. A critical success on its release, Optima broke new ground for what a sans serif design could look like, and was widely copied by other type suppliers, often infringing Zapf's copyright. Based on unserifed Greek inscriptional forms, Optima employs a tapering stem weight to achieve a novel, widely-adopted humanistic sans in a range of weights with an accompanying Greek text face. The italic is a sloped version of the roman. Like Zapf's other designs, Optima was badly digitised and overused during the desktop publishing boom. A new revision for Opentype is now available as Optima Next. | |  |
