Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf
Zapf in May 2007
Born	(1918-11-08)November 8, 1918 Nuremberg, German Empire
Died	June 4, 2015(2015-06-04) (aged 96) Darmstadt, Germany
Nationality	German
Occupation	type designer
Known for	Aldus, Palatino, Optima, Zapfino
Spouse(s)	Gudrun Zapf von Hesse
Children	One son, Christian

Specimens containing mostly capital letters of typefaces by Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf (German: [tsapf]; November 8, 1918 – June 4, 2015) was a German typeface designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. His typefaces include Palatino, Optima and Zapfino.

Early life

Hermann Zapf was born in Nuremberg^[1] during turbulent times marked by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in Munich and Berlin, the end of World War I, the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the establishment of Bavaria as a free state by Kurt Eisner. In addition, the Spanish Flu Pandemic took hold of Europe in 1918 and 1919 and killed two of Zapf's siblings.^[2] Famine later struck Germany, and Zapf's mother was grateful to send him to school in 1925, where he received daily meals in a program organized by Herbert Hoover. In school, Zapf was mainly interested in technical subjects. One of his favorite books was the annual science journal Das neue Universum ("The New Universe"). He and his older brother experimented with electricity, building a crystal radio and an alarm system for his house. Even at his early age, Zapf was already getting involved with type, inventing ciphertext alphabets to exchange secret messages with his brother.

Zapf left school in 1933 with the ambition to pursue a career in electrical engineering. Unfortunately, his father had become unemployed. Zapf's father experienced trouble with the newly established Third Reich, having been involved with trade unions.^[2] and was sent to the Dachau concentration camp for a short time.

Introduction to typography

Zapf was not able to attend the Ohm Technical Institute in Nuremberg, due to the new political regime. Therefore, he needed to find an apprenticeship. His teachers, aware of the new political difficulties, noticed Zapf's skill in drawing and suggested that he become a lithographer. Each company that interviewed him for an apprenticeship would ask him political questions, and every time he was interviewed, he was complimented on his work but was rejected. Ten months later, in 1934, he was interviewed by the last company in the telephone directory, and the company did not ask any political questions. They also complimented Zapf's work, but did not do lithography and did not need an apprentice lithographer. However, they allowed him to become a retoucher, and Zapf began his four-year apprenticeship in February 1934.

In 1935, Zapf attended an exhibition in Nuremberg in honor of the late typographer Rudolf Koch. This exhibition gave him his first interest in lettering. Zapf bought two books there, using them to teach himself calligraphy. He also studied examples of calligraphy in the Nuremberg city library. Soon, his master noticed his expertise in calligraphy, and Zapf's work shifted to lettering retouching and improvement of his colleagues' retouching work.

Frankfurt

A few days after finishing his apprenticeship, Zapf left for Frankfurt. He did not bear a journeyman's certificate and thus would not be able to get a work permit at another company in Nuremberg, as they would not have been able to check on his qualifications. Zapf went to the "Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck", a building run by Paul Koch, son of Rudolf Koch. He spent most of his time there working in typography and writing songbooks.

Through print historian Gustav Mori, Zapf came into contact with the type foundries D. Stempel, AG, and Linotype GmbH of Frankfurt. In 1938, he designed his first printed typeface for them, a fraktur type called Gilgengart.^[2][3]

War career

On April 1, 1939, Zapf was conscripted and sent to Pirmasens to help reinforce the Siegfried Line against France. As a consequence of hard labor, he developed heart trouble in a few weeks and was given a desk job, writing camp records and sports certificates in Fraktur.

World War II broke out in September, and Zapf's unit was to be taken into the Wehrmacht. However, due to his heart trouble, Zapf was not transferred to the Wehrmacht but was instead dismissed. But on April 1, 1942, he was summoned again for the war effort. Zapf had been chosen for the Luftwaffe, but instead was sent to the artillery in Weimar. He did not perform well, confusing left and right during training and being too cautious and clumsy with his gun. His officers soon brought an unusually early end to his career in the artillery.

Zapf was sent back to the office, and then to Jüterbog to train as a cartographer. After that, he went to Dijon and then Bordeaux, joining the staff of the First Army. In the cartography unit at Bordeaux, Zapf drew maps of Spain, especially the railway system, which could have been used to transport artillery had Francisco Franco not used narrow-gauge tracks to repair bridges after the Spanish Civil War. Zapf was happy in the cartography unit. His eyesight was so good that he could write letters 1 millimeter in size without using a magnifying glass, and this skill probably prevented him from being commissioned back into the army.

After the war had ended, Zapf was held by the French as a prisoner of war at a field hospital in Tübingen. He was treated with respect because of his artwork and, due to his poor health, was sent home only four weeks after the end of the war. He went back to Nuremberg, which had suffered great damage because of the air raids.

Post-war

Zapf taught calligraphy in Nuremberg in 1946. He returned to Frankfurt in 1947, where the type foundry Stempel offered him a position as artistic head of their printshop. They did not ask for qualifications, certificates, or references, but instead only required him to show them his sketchbooks from the war, and a calligraphic piece he did in 1944 of Hans von Weber's "Junggesellentext".

One of Zapf's products was a publication named "Feder und Stichel" ("Pen and Graver"), printed from metal plates designed by Zapf and cut by punch cutter August Rosenberger during the war. It was printed at the Stempel printshop in 1949.

From 1948 to 1950, Zapf taught calligraphy at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach, giving lettering lessons twice a week to two classes of graphics students. In 1951 he married Gudrun von Hesse, who taught at the school of Städel in Frankfurt.^[2]

Most of Zapf's work as a graphic artist was in book design. He worked for various publishing houses, including Suhrkamp Verlag, Insel Verlag, Büchergilde Gutenberg, Hanser Verlag, Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, and Verlag Philipp von Zabern.

Type design

Zapf's career in type design spanned the three most recent stages of printing: hot metal composition, phototypesetting (also called "cold type"), and finally digital design. His two most famous typefaces, Palatino and Optima, were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively.^[1] 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. Palatino 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.^[4][5]

Zapf's design Melior on the logo of CA Immo. Melior was inspired by Didone typography of around 1800 and incorporates his occasional use of the superellipse as a design motif.

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 text serif fonts such as Melior in the more austere, classical style, following the work of the great German neoclassical printer Justus-Erich Walbaum.^[6] 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.^[7] Maxim Zhukov remembered his contemporary Adrian Frutiger commenting on these that Zapf was 'not a sans-serif man' at a conference in 1990.^[8] Several of his more geometric designs, like both of these, make use of superellipses, squarish designs incorporating a slight curve.

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 metal type period. In this period he created Palatino Sans, a more informal modulated sans 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 shipped with 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.

Calligraphy

Though his calligraphy is considered superb by calligraphers, Zapf did not work extensively as a calligrapher. His largest calligraphic project was to write out the "Preamble to the United Nations Charter" in four languages, commissioned by the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1960, for which he received $1000.

Computer typography

Automated justification in a demonstration from the 1980s or 1990s, based on concepts developed by Zapf and implemented by URW. The technology was later purchased by Adobe and added to their InDesign product.

Zapf worked on typography for computer programs from the 1960s onwards. His ideas were considered radical, not taken seriously in Germany, and rejected by the Darmstadt University of Technology, where Zapf lectured between 1972 and 1981. Because he had no success in Germany, Zapf went to the United States. He lectured about his ideas in computerized typesetting, and was invited to speak at Harvard University in 1964. The University of Texas at Austin was also interested in Zapf, and offered him a professorship, which he did not take, because his wife opposed a move to that state.

Because Zapf's plans for the United States had come to nothing, and because their house in Frankfurt had become too small, Zapf and his wife moved to Darmstadt in 1972.

In 1976, the Rochester Institute of Technology offered Zapf a professorship in typographic computer programming, the first of its type in the world. He taught there from 1977 to 1987, flying between Darmstadt and Rochester. There he developed his ideas further, with the help of his connections in companies such as IBM and Xerox, and his discussions with the computer specialists at Rochester. A number of Zapf's students from this time at RIT went on to become influential type designers, including Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow, who together created the Lucida type family. Other prominent students include calligrapher/font designer Julian Waters and book designer Jerry Kelly.

In 1977, Zapf and his friends Aaron Burns and Herb Lubalin founded a company called Design Processing International, Inc. in New York and developed typographical computer software.^[1] It existed until 1986 with the death of Lubalin, and Zapf and Burns founded "Zapf, Burns & Company" in 1987. Burns, also an expert in typeface design and in typography, was in charge of marketing until his death in 1992. Shortly before, two of their employees had stolen Zapf's ideas and founded a company of their own.

Zapf knew that he could not run an American company from Darmstadt, and did not want to move to New York. Instead, he used his experience to begin development of a typesetting program called the "hz-program", building on the H&J system in TeX.

During financial problems and bankruptcy of URW (Type foundry, article in German) in the mid-1990s, Adobe Systems acquired the Hz patent(s), and later made some use of the concepts in their InDesign program.

Zapfino

In 1983, Zapf had completed the typeface AMS Euler with Donald Knuth and graduate students in Knuth's and Charles Bigelow's Digital Typography program at Stanford University including students Dan Mills, Carol Twombly, David Siegel, and Knuth's computer science Ph.D. students Scott Kim and John Hobby, for the American Mathematical Society. Euler digital font production was eventually finished by Siegel as his M.S. thesis project in 1985. Euler is a typeface family for mathematical composition including Latin, fraktur and Greek letters. After David Siegel had finished his studies at Stanford and was interested in entering the field of typography, he told Zapf his idea of making a typeface with a large number of glyph variations, and wanted to start with an example of Zapf's calligraphy, that was reproduced in a publication by the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago.

Zapf was concerned that this was the wrong way to go, and while he was interested in creating a complicated program, he was worried about starting something new. However, Zapf remembered a page of calligraphy from his sketchbook from 1944, and considered the possibility of making a typeface from it. He had previously tried to create a calligraphic typeface for Stempel in 1948, but hot metal composition placed too many limits on the freedom of swash characters. Such a pleasing result could only be achieved using modern digital technology, and so Zapf and Siegel began work on the complicated software necessary. Siegel also hired Gino Lee, a programmer from Boston, Massachusetts, to help work on the project.

Unfortunately, just before the project was completed, Siegel wrote a letter to Zapf, saying that his girlfriend had left him, and that he had lost all interest in anything. Thus Siegel abandoned the project and started a new life, working on bringing color to Macintosh computers, and later becoming a web site design expert.

Zapfino's development had become seriously delayed until Zapf presented the project to Linotype. They were prepared to complete it and reorganized the project. Zapf worked with Linotype to create four alphabets and various ornaments, flourishes, and other dingbats. Zapfino was released in 1998.

Later versions of Zapfino using the Apple Advanced Typography and OpenType technologies were able to make automatic ligatures and glyph substitutions (especially contextual ones in which the nature of ligatures and substituted glyphs is determined by other glyphs nearby or even in different words) that more accurately reflected the fluid and dynamic nature of Zapf's calligraphy.

Death

Zapf died on June 4, 2015 at the age of 96 in Darmstadt, Germany.^[2]

List of typefaces

A range of Zapf typeface designs

Zapf designed the following typefaces:

Awards

• 2010 Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse^[13][14]

Appearances in film

• Hermann Zapf starred in the film The Art of Hermann Zapf, produced in 1967 at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Missouri and in Zapf's design studio in Dreieichenhain, Germany.
• Hermann Zapf was also featured in the 2007 documentary Helvetica, by Gary Hustwit.

Publications

• Rick Cusick, What Our Lettering Needs: The Contribution of Hermann Zapf to Calligraphy & Type Design at Hallmark Cards is a thorough account of Hermann Zapf’s contributions to the artistry and success of Hallmark Cards. Published by RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press (December, 2011) ^[15]
• Jerry Kelly, 'Hermann Zapf - A survey of his early books', in Parenthesis; 16 (2009 February), p. 12-15
• Nikolaus Weichselbaumer, Der Typograph Hermann Zapf: Eine Werkbiographie. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-041498-1.
• Calligraphic Salutations: Hermann Zapf’s Letterheadings to Paul Standard is a collection of calligraphic embellishments that appeared at the heads of letters written by Hermann Zapf to Paul Standard in the 1940s and 1950s.^[16]
• August Rosenberger 1893–1980; A Tribute to one of the Greatest Masters of Punchcutting, an Art Now All but Extinct is Zapf's tribute to August Rosenberger through Zapf’s recollections of their collaboration both during and after World War II in Germany.^[17]
• The World of Alphabets by Hermann Zapf; A Kaleidoscope of Drawings and Letterforms is a CD-ROM that illustrates Hermann Zapf's typographic designs.^[18]
• Spend Your Alphabets Lavishly! * The work of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf is a collection of the works by Hermann and Gudrun Zapf.^[19]
• Alphabet Stories: A Chronicle of Technical Developments by Hermann Zapf (Alphabetgeschichten in German edition) is a narrative encompasses Hermann Zapf's life and work from his childhood days in Nuremberg though to his newest typeface releases with Linotype GmbH.^[20] The first edition was published in 2007.^[21]
  • Second edition was published in 2008, which added a 2-colour insert of letterpress-printed broadside designed by Zapf, typeset and printed at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection using Zapf's metal Virtuosa font.^[22]

References

External links

• Font Feature: The Lifestory of Hermann Zapf
• Zapf's autobiography
• Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg (German)
• Postage stamps designed by Zapf