In 1975, a journalist wrote, "Hermann Zapf is one of the most important type designers of our time, yet the period of his greatest contribution was over 10 years ago." Little did that writer know that Zapf was a long way from hanging up his brush.

Palatino, Optima, Melior, Virtuosa, Aldus and Kompakt are just some of the typeface designs Zapf created early in his career. These were designed mostly for Linotype at a time when type foundries chose not to cross-license their designs. Since his designs were—and still are—a vital component of any well-planned typographic offering, Linotype’s competitors produced virtual clones of Zapf’s typefaces for their own customers. After seeing this happen time and again, Zapf concluded that it was neither intelligent nor profitable to continue a career designing typefaces for others to plagiarize. In the mid-1960s, Zapf stopped designing commercial typefaces. Over a decade passed before a new typeface of his was released.

A CRITICAL MEETING
Zapf’s re-emergence into type design began when Aaron Burns founded International Typeface Corporation in 1971. The company was built on the principle that it would license typeface designs on a nonexclusive basis to any company that agreed to a relatively basic and straightforward business relationship. Three years later, on a cool October morning, Zapf visited Burns in his New York office. At their meeting, Burns was able to convince Zapf of the soundness of ITC’s business philosophy.

Upon returning home to Germany, Zapf wrote to Burns of his intention to design a new text typeface—which he would offer to ITC. In Zapf’s words, “The system worked out by ITC is the only way to get better conditions for type designers. So I will … carefully prepare my alphabet proposal for my new relationship with ITC. … The design will be a blending of Melior, Bodoni and Walbaum as a special text face to which we may later add swash characters for display.” The blended design eventually became ITC Zapf Book, which was released in the spring of 1976.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN SOFTWARE
The relationship with ITC continued, with Zapf designing ITC Zapf International in 1976 and ITC Zapf Chancery in 1978. In 1977 Zapf, Burns and Herb Lubalin founded a company called Design Processing International in New York to develop typographical computer software. After Lubalin died in 1981, the company became Zapf, Burns & Company. Burns was in charge of marketing until his death in 1991.

Zapf knew he could not run an American company from Germany, and he did not want to move to New York. Instead, he began to develop, in conjunction with a German software company, a typesetting program called the “hz-program.” The company, however, fell into bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, and Zapf’s program followed it into obscurity.

BIRTH OF A NEW CLASSIC
A typeface that could surpass the popularity of his earlier triumvirate of Optima, Palatino and Melior grew out of a design project to support yet another software program. In the early 1990s Zapf developed a typeface called AMS-Euler for the American Mathematical Society. This was a collaborative project with Stanford University professor Donald Knuth and a young student, David Siegel, who converted Zapf’s drawings into digital fonts.

In 1992 Siegel wrote Zapf, explaining his idea to replicate handwriting with digital type. To make the type look realistic, he explained, the letters and their joining strokes would change contextually and the height of the baseline would vary, as with normal handwriting. All this would be accomplished with a new software program he was developing.

Zapf was intrigued by the idea but also had misgivings. “While I was interested in working with this new and complicated program,” he later wrote, “I was also a little concerned about starting something absolutely new without any technical instructions. Siegel also wanted to base the typeface on some of my calligraphy that just did not seem right.”

The answer to Zapf’s latter concern came in the form of a small piece of calligraphy in a sketchbook he had kept while in the army. This same calligraphy had been the model for Virtuosa Script, which had been released as handset metal type in 1948. Knowing that the design of Virtuosa was compromised because of the restrictions metal type put on the design process, Zapf thought, “Perhaps this new software might allow the calligraphy to be made into a workable font.”

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Trusting in Siegel’s ability to develop the software, Zapf immersed himself in the project. He designed hundreds of characters based on the calligraphy, including many alternate designs for most letters and a massive suite of swash and ligatured characters. The process of programming the font to perform as intended, however, proved to be prohibitively time-consuming. Development moved in fits and starts—then finally ground to a halt in the mid-1990s.

Zapf recalls, “With all the ups and downs of the technical aspects of the project, design of the typeface had been suspended. That is until 1997, when I plucked up the courage to show the unfinished project to Linotype. It took about a year, but they were able to put the whole thing into some semblance of order.” Zapf and Linotype eventually agreed on four alphabets, throwing some letters out and adding many new ones. The completed Zapfino character suite was released as digital fonts in 1998. Stripped of the software to automatically insert the alternate and special characters into copy, however, Zapfino required users to jump from one font to another to achieve the intended results.

OPENTYPE OPENS DOORS
Today’s Zapfino Extra is an OpenType font based on Zapfino. Converting the original design into an OpenType font was a monumental task, but Zapf, in collaboration with Linotype design director Akira Kobayashi, came up with a typographic tour de force. For the new version, Zapf and Linotype added small caps, mathematical symbols, additional ligatures, fractional numbers and a series of “hyper-flourishes” that can extend over three or more lines of copy. The contextual substitution capabilities of OpenType allow Zapfino’s diverse characters to be added and removed as the type is set—approximating the freedom and flexibility of calligraphy.

The Zapfino story, however, is far from over. Zapf and Linotype are now in the final stages of developing Zapfino Ink. According to Zapf, “I still had the calligraphic example of 1944 in my head. It was done with a very small pen using red ink, and I still wanted to transfer the effect to the Zapfino design. It should show the moving pen and natural flow of the ink on paper.” In other words, he wanted the font to replicate the nuances, texture and, at times, transparency of the ink.

To meet this challenge, Zapf redrew every character in the Zapfino range at a very large size, imitating how it would look if the 1944 calligraphy was greatly enlarged. The drawings were then digitized, carefully maintaining the subtleties of brush strokes and ink coloration. The end result, due to be released late in 2007, will be a collection of characters as “Photofont” files that can be set together for very short blocks of copy.

PENULTIMATE CHALLENGE
Even though Zapf worked on the Zapfino design intermittently for over a dozen years, he maintains that it was not his most difficult design project. Zapf’s biggest challenge was not a typeface, and it was not a complicated suite of calligraphic lettering. It wasn’t even a software program. It was the 27-panel etched glass wall erected at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.

Zapf has maintained a close relationship with RIT since 1957, when he was invited to visit the college by Alexander Lawson, professor of typography from 1947 to 1977. Zapf became a guest lecturer for several years, as well as an ad hoc adviser to David Pankow, librarian and curator of the Cary Collection, nationally recognized as one of the country’s premier libraries on the history and practice of printing.

It was Pankow who brought Zapf back to RIT to meet his daunting design challenge.

Pankow has facilitated the sharing of Cary Collection resources with RIT students and faculty since 1979, but he always sensed another opportunity. “It seemed a shame that there was no other mechanism for the Cary Collection to reach people outside the RIT environment,” he says.

A NEW PUBLISHING VENTURE
Pankow sought out publishing opportunities as a way to extend the influence and reach of the collection. The resulting books featured strong scholarship and editorial direction, elegant design and fine printing techniques. These became the foundation of the Cary Graphic Arts Press.

In 2006 Pankow began to plan a space for the Press that would include an editorial conference room, a sales and exhibition gallery and production management offices. The space would be called the Alexander S. Lawson Publishing Center and be located adjacent to the Cary Collection on the second floor of the Wallace Library at RIT.

The motif of the Golden Mean, in a version adapted for book page-layout design, is the inspiration for the center’s overall design. Initially, walls were to be glass and wood, but early on Pankow changed the plan to all glass. “Because of the unique structure of the space, it became obvious to me that glass panels were the only answer,” he recalls. His vision was a glass wall following a spiral curve based on the Golden Mean. The wall would be inscribed with famous quotations about reading, publishing and typography, and the rest of the spiral would be inlaid in the wood floor. And who better to do the typography for the wall than Hermann Zapf?

TYPOGRAPHIC OPUS
The project was pursued symphonically between the architect, LaBella Associates of Rochester; calligrapher and book designer Jerry Kelly in Manhattan; Valerie O’Hara, RIT alumnus and owner of Pike Stained Glass Studios in Rochester; and Zapf in Germany—all conducted by Pankow.

Pankow and his staff researched the quotes. Zapf designed the typography for the panels. Kelly set the type and provided the final art. O’Hara etched the typography into the glass.

COUNTERPOINT
Says Zapf, “The design of the glass panel wall was, because of its huge dimensions, an absolutely new experience. As a type designer, most of my alphabets are drawn at small sizes—approximately ½ to ⅞ inches high. But here I had to realize that each letter would be seen later on a much larger scale and in a very different environment. This was the biggest job I had ever taken on.”

Not only the scale, but also the substrate provided formidable challenges. Each panel is either 18 or 36 in. wide, over 8 ft. high and weighs over 400 lbs., according to Pankow. “And, although strong, tempered glass becomes very fragile if the surface tension is broken,” he notes. “The letters had to be etched deep enough to have substance—but if Valerie cut too deep the panel could explode.” He is quick to add, “None did.”

Construction began in November 2006, and the last panel was not installed until the morning of the day Zapf dedicated the center in the spring of 2007. The final note of the opus was played when Zapf signed one of the panels with a diamond-tipped stylus.

Hermann Zapf will be 89 on his next birthday. He has no plans to hang up his brush.

www.hermannzapf.de