an optimastic outlook

Yes, I know. But I really couldn't resist that heading. Sorry.

To be honest, I don't really like Optima, and I'd walk a million miles in order to avoid using it. But the whole point of this little avoiding-helvetica series is that sometimes I'm going to have to confront some demons. And at least the story behind Optima is an interesting one: so maybe I'll need to pull it out of my dusty old type drawer and give it another go.

Optima was designed by Hermann Zapf and is his most successful typeface. In 1950, Zapf made his first sketches while visiting the Santa Croce church in Florence. He sketched letters from grave plates that had been cut about 1530, and as he had no other paper with him at the time, the sketches were done on two 1000 lire bank notes. These letters from the floor of the church inspired Optima, a typeface that is classically roman in proportion and character, but without serifs. The letterforms were designed in the proportions of the Golden Ratio.

In 1952, after careful legibility testing, the first drawings were finished. The type was cut by the famous punchcutter August Rosenberger at the D. Stempel AG type foundry in Frankfurt. Optima was produced in matrices for the Linotype typesetting machines and released in 1958. With the clear, simple elegance of its sans serif forms and the warmly human touches of its tapering stems, this family has proved popular around the world. Optima is an all-purpose typeface; it works for just about anything from book text to signage. It is available in 12 weights and 4 companion fonts with Central European characters and accents.

In 2002, more than 50 years after the first sketches, Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi completed Optima Nova, an expansion and redesign of the Optima family.

And now on to Octavian, which was designed by Will Carter and David Kindersley for the Monotype Corporation in 1961.

Will Carter described it thus: "While the ultimate authority is the ancient inscriptional pattern, the physical characteristics of the present rendering are manifest in the economic proportions of the shapes and the modified relations of the strokes. Thus, the letters are narrower than the classical forms and their weight heavier."

Apparently, Octavian is a fine book font and works well for other text settings that are less demanding, such as magazines and brochures. I've never used it, though.

Comments

[Andrew]

So what is it you don't like about optima – overusage elsewhere?

[davidthedesigner]

Well, Andrew, it reminds me of a dreadful time in the late 70s / early 80s when filmsetting was horribly expensive, so the affordable option for the designer on a budget was paying a typesetter who used the IBM Selectric - http://ibmcomposer.org/ . And I'm sure that Optima was one of the less-offensive fonts available. Mind you, I can't find it listed as being one of the available fonts (although, of course, it would have been called something else), so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

But, apart from that, I think whatever you're working on demands either a serif or a sans-serif font - so what's the point of a font which is neither one nor the other. To my mind it's the graphic equivalent of the James Last Orchestra http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqny26sFonQ&feature=related