Hermann Zapf
Hermann Zapf was born in Nuremberg, Germany on November 8, 1918. His main work as a graphic artist has involved book design for publishing houses. As a matter of principle he does not work for advertising agencies.
Other important areas of activity have included the development of printing types, such as Palatino Antiqua, Optima, et cetera, alphabets for hot metal composition, then for phototypesetting, and finally for the digital resolution of types.
The Palatino alphabet, named after the Italian writing master of the 16th century Giambattista Palatino, was designed after many careful studies together with the punchcutter August Rosenberger. Even such small details as the serifs were carefully scrutinized. In 1948 tests in offset printing were made, especially in connection with the weight of the serifs. You see how important such serifs are!
In 1993, Zapf had completed the typeface AMS Euler with Donald Knuth and David Siegel of Stanford University for the American Mathematical Society, a typeface for mathematical composition including fraktur and Greek letters. David Siegel had recently 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 Typographical 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 was too limiting 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, 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 an Internet design expert.
Zapfino's development had become seriously delayed, until Zapf found the courage to present 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 (so called contextual features) that more accurately reflected the fluid and dynamic nature of Zapf's calligraphy.