Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958.
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Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958.
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Zapf intended Optima to be a typeface that could serve for both body text and titling.
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Optima quickly sketched an early draft of the design on a 1000 lira banknote.
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Optima was the first German typeface not based on the standard baseline alignment.
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The proportions of Optima Roman are now in the Golden Section: lowercase x-height equalling the minor and ascenders-descenders the major.
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Optima was first manufactured as a foundry version in 1958 by Stempel of Frankfurt, and by Mergenthaler in America shortly thereafter.
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Optima's design follows humanist lines; its capitals originate from the classic Roman monumental capital model, reflecting a reverence for Roman capitals as an ideal form.
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Optima is an example of a modulated-stroke sans-serif, a design type where the strokes are variable in width.
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Optima is however quite restrained in stroke width variation; more display-oriented predecessors such as Britannic show far more differentiation in stroke width than Optima does.
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Optima nova is a redesign of the original font family, designed by Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashi.
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Optima is used for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and was used by John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
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