THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU THESE TYPEFACES
Obituary for a giant of design,
Hermann Zapf, whose calling in life —“to create beautiful letters,” as one of his students put it — found expression in lush, steady-handed calligraphy and in subtly inventive typefaces that have brought words to readers on paper, on signposts, on monuments and on computer screens for more than half a century, died on June 4 at his home in Darmstadt, Germany. He was 96.
Jerry Kelly, a leading American typographer, calligrapher and type designer who was a friend and former student of Zapf, confirmed the death.
In the world of type design — an exacting, arcane craft that is underappreciated for its impact on how people communicate and receive communication — Zapf (pronounced DZAHFF) was a giant.
Prolific and versatile, he created around 200 typefaces in numerous alphabets, including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and Cherokee, spanning the eras of metal typesetting, phototypesetting and digital typesetting. His typefaces include:
Palatino, his breakthrough font, a much-copied classical Roman design adapted for the 20th century. It is available on Microsoft Word and from Linotype and other sources and is being used by Abercrombie & Fitch for its corporate logo.
Optima, a revolutionary font that melded the thick and thin strokes of a traditional typeface within a sans serif design. Its capital letters are used for the names inscribed on the Maya Lin-designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and its bold version was used for John McCain’s presidential campaign posters and buttons and continues to be used by the Estée Lauder cosmetics company on its packaging.
Melior, a serif type designed for newspapers including the Village Voice, which used it for years.
Hunt Roman, a sturdy serif designed for use by a botanical library.
Zapfino, a sweeping calligraphic font that ships with every Macintosh computer.
Zapf Dingbats, a collection of symbols that achieved wide popularity when it was built into an Apple laser printer in the 1980s.
It may be difficult to explain the type designer’s art to the unschooled, but in interviews other type designers had no trouble assessing Zapf’s stature.
“Last Thursday, all the rest of us moved up one,” said Matthew Carter, whose designs for web fonts, including Verdana and Georgia, earned a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award, in 2010. “That’s my way of saying Hermann was on top.”
“What Michelangelo was to sculpture and Beethoven was to music, that’s what Hermann Zapf is to type design and calligraphy,” Kelly said. “We’re all followers of his now.”
The type designer works letter by letter, but also with a concept of the whole; the art resides in a multi-faceted esthetic that considers the shapes of letters (does the capital “G,” for example, have a horizontal ledge?); modulations in the thickness of a letter’s lines (an “o” with its sides wider than its top and bottom curves); and the relationship of the letters to one another (should the vertical line of a lowercase “b” or “d” rise as high as a capital letter?).
Working with these elements, Zapf evoked beauty as well as clarity, cleverness without hubris, invention without distraction.
A master calligrapher who could reproduce a typeface by hand, he brought an admiration of the art of the pen to the art of the font. And conscious of history, he felt that type should both acknowledge tradition and reflect modernity. “Zapf was someone who could write 10-point type” — letters less than 4.2 millimetres high — “and it looked like a typeface,” said Steve Matteson, who designed Droid Serif and other fonts for cellphone screens as well as Open Sans for Google pages and ads. “It was pretty astounding; his muscle control was so fluid.”