Optima History

Optima was designed between 1952 and 1955 by Hermann Zapf, a German typeface designer from Darmstadt, Germany who also designed other popular types like Palatino and Zapfino. Optima combined the features of both serif and sans serif into a humanistic design. The capitals, much like Palatino’s, directly refer to the Roman capitals. It is a legible font that lends it self to a wide range of applications.

Optima wasn’t commercially released until 1958 by Berthold, one of the largest and most successful type foundries in the world. With Optima’s faux classy design a lot of designers gravitated toward it in the 60’s and 70’s for display and text lines as well as being used in brochures, catalogues and magazines. It was also used on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and in John McCain’s presidential campagn.

In 2002 Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashia redesigned the font family into what the called Optima Nova which contained 7 new font weights. Optima is now a trademark of Linotype corp. The Optima typeface, like all of Zapf’s designs, was widely admired and imitated a few times.

For my book Im going to do something roman with it. Either go along with the whole column theme like the pantheon and stuff. OR Trojan condoms. Roman, because Optima was strongly inspired by the writings on roman columns. Another idea is to play off of the vietnam memorial.