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Zapf Dingbats symbols in a pattern
Zapf Dingbats, the digital ornaments typeface that brought Hermann Zapf’s name to global attention
Zapf Dingbats, the digital ornaments typeface that brought Hermann Zapf’s name to global attention

Hermann Zapf obituary

This article is more than 8 years old
Renowned typographer who designed faces such as Optima, Palatino and Dingbats and kept up with technological changes across seven decades

In 1963 Hermann Zapf walked into an American design school, snapped a piece of chalk in half and, with its side edge, drew a perfect lowercase g on the blackboard. He went on to give an inspired lecture on the different angles that a calligrapher uses when holding a pen, and how strokes differ between calligraphy and typography – all illustrated, not with slides, but with impeccably executed chalk drawings.

Zapf, who has died aged 96, showed off these sumptuous drawing skills on many occasions over his long life, not always with the calligrapher’s usual tools of nibbed pen or fine brush. He could draw a faultless line just as easily with chalk on a board or with a ballpoint on a school pad, and in 1960 was chosen to write out the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations, held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. He also brought his calligraphic talent to the design of a string of typefaces over seven decades, a period in which the industry moved rapidly from hot metal typesetting through photocomposition to digitisation. Zapf is one of the few people who designed letters for all three methods.

Immediately after the second world war, Frankfurt became the centre of West Germany’s book trade. Its type foundries needed new Roman types since blackletter, the traditional script once regarded by the Nazis as quintessentially German, had been replaced by the Roman alphabet as the standard in 1941. Zapf worked for the Stempel foundry and in 1949 he designed the Palatino typeface for it.

Palatino was quite unlike anything produced in pre-war Germany. It was clearly influenced by Italian letterforms, even though at that stage Zapf had never been to Italy. It has gone on to become one of the world’s most widely used typefaces.

Zapf was born in Nuremberg three days before the end of fighting in the first world war. In 1933, the year he left school, his father lost his job in a car factory because of his trade union activities. Zapf was thereby prevented from studying engineering, and instead became an apprentice retoucher in a printing firm. While there he was inspired by an exhibition of the work of Rudolf Koch, the German type designer, to take up calligraphy, which he studied in his spare time with such intensity that his parents would remonstrate with him about overuse of the electric lights late at night.

In 1938, his apprenticeship over, Zapf was introduced to the Stempel foundry, and began work on his first typeface, a blackletter called Gilgenhart. Then, in April 1939, he was called up and sent to a work unit reinforcing the Siegfried Line. He was found medically unfit for hard labour and given an office job, writing out records and certificates in blackletter. Later in the second world war he became a cartographer.

In the decade that followed the success of Palatino, Zapf designed more than a dozen typefaces for Stempel and Linotype. This culminated in 1958 with the launch of Optima, which had slight swellings at the end of its letterforms rather than serifs (cross strokes). Zapf called it a “serifless roman”. Optima divides opinion in the typographic world, but few would deny its sculptural quality, perhaps seen to best effect in the Vietnam memorial in Washington, completed in 1982, for which it was chosen as the typeface for the names of the dead.

Hermann Zapf was chosen to write out the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations. Photograph: Linotype

By the 1960s Zapf was a frequent visitor to the US. He was typographic consultant at both Mergenthaler Linotype and Hallmark, the greeting cards manufacturer, and a frequent lecturer at various design colleges and universities. In 1976 he was invited to become a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, specialising in computerised typesetting programs, and while there he worked on type composition software in conjunction with his students, as well as with both IBM and Xerox.

In 1985, Apple manufactured the first laser printer to use the PostScript page description language and the 10 type families bundled with this release included three designed by Zapf. One was Palatino, but it was the other two – Zapf Chancery and Zapf Dingbats – that would bring him worldwide recognition, since they carried his name. The latter brought to public attention all the little symbols that have been known by printers for centuries as “ornaments”. Zapf designed more than 1,000 of these, but only about a third appear in the digitised typeface.

Zapf’s understanding of the computer engineering skills used in today’s typography were demonstrated in his final great project, the typeface Zapfino. This had its origins in a page of calligraphy he had drawn in a sketchbook in 1944, but the number of alternate characters needed to reproduce the swashes and ligatures – flourishes and combinations of otherwise clashing letters – could not be handled by early digitisation methods. The development of OpenType font technology from the mid-1990s onwards made its release in 1998 possible. It was then reworked by Zapf himself in 2003.

He is survived by his wife, Gudrun von Hesse, also a calligrapher and type designer, whom he married in 1951, and by three granddaughters. Their son, Christian, died in 2012.

Hermann Zapf, typographer and calligrapher, born 8 November 1918; died 4 June 2015

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