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71-864: In 2009, the project released Linux Biolinum : it is a sans serif font designed to pair well with Libertine. It resembles Optima . In 2012, a monospaced serif font face was released, Linux Libertine Mono . Derivative works include the following. Linux Libertine is a proportional serif typeface inspired by 19th century book type and is intended as a replacement for the Times font family. The typeface has five styles: regular, bold, italic, bold italic, and small capitals, all of which are available in TrueType and OpenType format, as well as in source code . The OpenType version allows automatic positioning and substitution, including true fractions, ligatures and kerning . A display type variant, while similar in letter form,

142-465: A sans-serif , Optima has a subtle swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic serif . Optima was inspired by classical Roman capitals and the stonecarving on Renaissance -period tombstones Zapf saw in Florence on a 1950 holiday to Italy. Zapf intended Optima to be a typeface that could serve for both body text and titling. To prove its versatility, Zapf set his entire book About Alphabets in

213-540: A competitor to Ludwig & Mayer's Colonia design, which has not been digitised. Shaw also suggests the little-known 1948 design Romann Antiqua, as well as Stellar by Robert Hunter Middleton as predecessors, and notes the existence of Pascal by José Mendoza y Almeida (1962) as a design with a similar set of influences. 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. Optima's sloped version

284-610: A halt in 2012, the actively developed Libertinus fonts are de facto a continuation of the now stalled Linux Libertine project. Khaled passed the role of maintainer on to Caleb Maclennan in 2020. Stefan Peev forked the Libertinus Serif font to create the Common Serif font in 2022. Optima Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt , West Germany in 1958. Though classified as

355-427: A lower case or italics , since they were not needed for such uses. They were sometimes released by width, with a range of widths from extended to normal to condensed, with each style different, meaning to modern eyes they can look quite irregular and eccentric. Grotesque typefaces have limited variation of stroke width (often none perceptible in capitals). The terminals of curves are usually horizontal, and many have

426-643: A lower-case 'L' with a curl or 'i' with serif under the dot. A particular subgenre of sans-serifs is those such as Rothbury, Britannic , Radiant , and National Trust with obvious variation in stroke width. These have been called 'modulated', 'stressed' or 'high-contrast' sans-serifs. They are nowadays often placed within the humanist genre, although they predate Johnston which started the modern humanist genre. These may take inspiration from sources outside printing such as brush lettering or calligraphy. Letters without serifs have been common in writing across history, for example in casual, non-monumental epigraphy of

497-522: A more unified range of styles than on previous designs, allowing a wider range of text to be set artistically through setting headings and body text in a single family. The style of design using asymmetric layouts, Helvetica and a grid layout extensively has been called the Swiss or International Typographic Style . This gallery presents images of sans-serif lettering and type across different times and places from early to recent. Particular attention

568-575: A result, printing done in the Latin alphabet for the first three hundred and fifty years of printing was "serif" in style, whether in blackletter , roman type , italic or occasionally script . The earliest printing typefaces which omitted serifs were not intended to render contemporary texts, but to represent inscriptions in Ancient Greek and Etruscan . Thus, Thomas Dempster 's De Etruria regali libri VII (1723), used special types intended for

639-775: A spurred "G" and an "R" with a curled leg. Capitals tend to be of relatively uniform width. Cap height and ascender height are generally the same to produce a more regular effect in texts such as titles with many capital letters, and descenders are often short for tighter line spacing. They often avoid having a true italic in favor of a more restrained oblique or sloped design, although at least some sans-serif true italics were offered. Examples of grotesque typefaces include Akzidenz-Grotesk , Venus , News Gothic , Franklin Gothic , IBM Plex and Monotype Grotesque . Akzidenz Grotesk Old Face, Knockout, Grotesque No. 9 and Monotype Grotesque are examples of digital fonts that retain more of

710-417: A strong impact internationally: Helvetica came to be the most used typeface for the following decades. Geometric sans-serif typefaces are based on geometric shapes, like near-perfect circles and squares. Common features are a nearly-circular capital 'O', sharp and pointed uppercase 'N' vertices, and a "single-storey" lowercase letter 'a'. The 'M' is often splayed and the capitals of varying width, following

781-409: A study of Schelter & Giesecke specimens; Mosley describes this as "thoroughly discredited"; even in 1986 Walter Tracy described the claimed dates as "on stylistic grounds   ... about forty years too early". Sans-serif lettering and typefaces were popular due to their clarity and legibility at distance in advertising and display use, when printed very large or small. Because sans-serif type

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852-613: A typeface expressly designed to be suitable for both display and body text. Some humanist designs may be more geometric, as in Gill Sans and Johnston (especially their capitals), which like Roman capitals are often based on perfect squares, half-squares and circles, with considerable variation in width. These somewhat architectural designs may feel too stiff for body text. Others such as Syntax , Goudy Sans and Sassoon Sans more resemble handwriting, serif typefaces or calligraphy. Frutiger , from 1976, has been particularly influential in

923-708: Is a more informal typeface in the same style, with a design reminiscent of brushstrokes or calligraphy. Kontour Type designed the Utile Display typeface, inspired from the Optima typeface. Optima is used for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and used in the official logo and most publications associated with Expo 67 in Montreal. Optima was chosen as the font to be used for

994-691: Is a redesign of the original font family, designed by Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashi. The new family contains seven font weights, adding light, demi, and heavy font weights, but removing extra black weight. Medium weight is readjusted to between medium and bold weights in the old family scale. Glyph sets are expanded to include Adobe CE and Latin Extended characters, with light to bold weight fonts supporting proportional lining figures, old style figures, and small caps. The initial and most common release of Optima, like many sans-serif fonts, has an oblique style instead of an italic :

1065-562: Is called Egyptian Characters ". Around 1816, the Ordnance Survey began to use 'Egyptian' lettering, monoline sans-serif capitals, to mark ancient Roman sites. This lettering was printed from copper plate engraving. Around 1816, William Caslon IV produced the first sans-serif printing type in England for the Latin alphabet, a capitals-only face under the title 'Two Lines English Egyptian' , where 'Two Lines English' referred to

1136-558: Is lighter in weight and bears a closer resemblance to old-style types such as Palatino . There is also a complementary humanist sans-serif face, Linux Biolinum, similar to Optima or Candara . It is available in bold and italic styles. Linux Libertine contains more than 2,000 glyphs and encompasses character sets such as the Greek Alphabet , Cyrillic script , and Hebrew alphabet . Additionally, it offers several ligatures (such as f‌f, f‌i, and c‌t, and

1207-584: Is not a conventional feature on grotesque and neo-grotesque designs. Due to the diversity of sans-serif typefaces, many do not exactly fit into the above categories. For example, Neuzeit S has both neo-grotesque and geometric influences, as does Hermann Zapf 's URW Grotesk . Whitney blends humanist and grotesque influences, while Klavika is a geometric design not based on the circle. Sans-serif typefaces intended for signage, such as Transport and Tern (both used on road signs), may have unusual features to enhance legibility and differentiate characters, such as

1278-472: Is still used in East Asian typography and sometimes seen in typeface names like News Gothic , Highway Gothic , Franklin Gothic or Trade Gothic . Sans-serif typefaces are sometimes, especially in older documents, used as a device for emphasis , due to their typically blacker type color . For the purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into three or four major groups,

1349-448: Is that sans-serifs are based on either " fat face typefaces " or slab-serifs with the serifs removed. It is now known that the inspiration was more classical antiquity, and sans-serifs appeared before the first dated appearance of slab-serif letterforms in 1810. The Schelter & Giesecke foundry also claimed during the 1920s to have been offering a sans-serif with lower-case by 1825. Wolfgang Homola dated it in 2004 to 1882 based on

1420-411: Is the same as "Optima nova Condensed", but also includes extra ligatures. Berry writes in his review of the "nova" release: "it has softly curved joins and interior angles. Instead of the added crispness of detail that you might expect of a face designed for display use, this one looks more sculptural." In the tradition of hand lettering and lapidary inscription, the titling face shares similarities with

1491-580: The capital ß ). It also includes special characters such as International Phonetic Alphabet , arrows, floral symbols , Roman numbers , text figures , and small caps . The Tux mascot is included at the Unicode code point U+E000. In 2010, Linux Libertine was adopted as an open-source substitute for the Hoefler Text typeface in the redesign of the Misplaced Pages logo , making it possible to localize

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1562-514: The classical model . The geometric sans originated in Germany in the 1920s. Two early efforts in designing geometric types were made by Herbert Bayer and Jakob Erbar , who worked respectively on Universal Typeface (unreleased at the time but revived digitally as Architype Bayer ) and Erbar ( c.  1925 ). In 1927 Futura , by Paul Renner , was released to great acclaim and popularity. Geometric sans-serif typefaces were popular from

1633-505: The "astonishing" effect the unusual style had on the public. The lettering style apparently became referred to as "old Roman" or "Egyptian" characters, referencing the classical past and a contemporary interest in Ancient Egypt and its blocky, geometric architecture. Mosley writes that "in 1805 Egyptian letters were happening in the streets of London, being plastered over shops and on walls by signwriters, and they were astonishing

1704-777: The (generally wider) slab serif and "fat faces" of the period. It also added a lower-case. The term "grotesque" comes from the Italian word for cave , and was often used to describe Roman decorative styles found by excavation, but had long become applied in the modern sense for objects that appeared "malformed or monstrous". The term "grotesque" became commonly used to describe sans-serifs. Similar condensed sans-serif display typefaces, often capitals-only, became very successful. Sans-serif printing types began to appear thereafter in France and Germany. A few theories about early sans-serifs now known to be incorrect may be mentioned here. One

1775-430: The 1920s and 1930s due to their clean, modern design, and many new geometric designs and revivals have been developed since. Notable geometric types of the period include Kabel , Semplicità , Bernhard Gothic , Nobel and Metro ; more recent designs in the style include ITC Avant Garde , Brandon Grotesque , Gotham , Avenir , Product Sans , HarmonyOS Sans and Century Gothic . Many geometric sans-serif alphabets of

1846-546: The 3.5 release. Khaled Hosny forked the Linux Libertine font family in 2012 that stemmed from a lack of a matching mathematical companion font for Linux Libertine. He officially released the initial version of his fork in 2016. Due to licensing restrictions of Linux Libertine regarding the need to change the name of derivative works, he renamed his version to Libertinus fonts (including Libertinus Serif and Libertinus Sans ). Hosny also used this opportunity to unify

1917-457: The Egyptians had no letters, you will doubtless conceive must be curious. They are simply the common characters, deprived of all beauty and all proportion by having all the strokes of equal thickness, so that those which should be thin look as if they had the elephantiasis." Similarly, the painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary on 13 September 1805 of seeing a memorial engraved "in what

1988-657: The French word sans , meaning "without" and "serif" of uncertain origin, possibly from the Dutch word schreef meaning "line" or pen-stroke. In printed media, they are more commonly used for display use and less for body text . Before the term "sans-serif" became standard in English typography, a number of other terms had been used. One of these terms for sans-serif was "grotesque", often used in Europe, and " gothic ", which

2059-477: The Futura, Erbar and Kabel tradition include Bank Gothic , DIN 1451 , Eurostile and Handel Gothic , along with many of the typefaces designed by Ray Larabie . Humanist sans-serif typefaces take inspiration from traditional letterforms, such as Roman square capitals , traditional serif typefaces and calligraphy. Many have true italics rather than an oblique , ligatures and even swashes in italic. One of

2130-499: The Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum typefaces are used by the open-source design publication Libre Graphics Magazine and the Association for Computing Machinery journals and conference proceedings. László Németh created a variant of fonts with additional Graphite font tables: Linux Libertine G and Linux Biolinum G . Both these fonts are bundled with LibreOffice as of the suite's 3.3 release, with some features added in

2201-531: The Theater as the Highest Symbol of a Culture), by Peter Behrens , in 1900. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sans-serif types were viewed with suspicion by many printers, especially those of fine book printing , as being fit only for advertisements (if that), and to this day most books remain printed in serif typefaces as body text. This impression would not have been helped by

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2272-469: The United States. Tired & inappropriate. I don’t blame the typeface but the designers." He also commented "Optima is patronizing. It hasn't got the guts to be either a proper Sans or Serif, so it keeps all its options open and appeals to the middle...It suits everything and pleases nobody." Jonathan Hoefler described it as "signifying a very down-market notion of luxe...the font of choice for

2343-479: The Misplaced Pages identity into more than 250 languages and character sets. The "W" character, which had previously been used in various other places in Misplaced Pages (such as the favicon ) and was a "distinctive part of the Misplaced Pages brand", had "crossed" V glyphs in the original logo, while Linux Libertine has a joined W letter shape. As a solution, the "crossed" W was added to Linux Libertine as an OpenType variant. Both

2414-417: The classic Roman monumental capital model , reflecting a reverence for Roman capitals as an ideal form. Optima is an example of a modulated-stroke sans-serif, a design type where the strokes are variable in width. The design style has been intermittently favored since the late nineteenth century; Optima is one of the most lasting examples of the genre. Optima was originally targeted by Stempel's Walter Cunz as

2485-549: The classical period. However, Roman square capitals , the inspiration for much Latin-alphabet lettering throughout history, had prominent serifs. While simple sans-serif letters have always been common in "uncultured" writing and sometimes even in epigraphy, such as basic handwriting, most artistically-authored letters in the Latin alphabet, both sculpted and printed, since the Middle Ages have been inspired by fine calligraphy, blackletter writing and Roman square capitals . As

2556-668: The condensed forms of the contemporary sans cuttings of the last thirty years." Leading type designer Adrian Frutiger wrote in 1961 on designing a new face, Univers , on the nineteenth-century model: "Some of these old sans-serifs have had a real renaissance within the last twenty years, once the reaction of the 'New Objectivity' had been overcome. A purely geometrical form of type is unsustainable." Of this period in Britain, Mosley has commented that in 1960 "orders unexpectedly revived" for Monotype's eccentric Monotype Grotesque design: "[it] represents, even more evocatively than Univers,

2627-481: The design was "cruder but much larger" than its predecessor, making it a success. Thereafter sans-serif capitals rapidly began to be issued from London typefounders. Much imitated was the Thorowgood "grotesque" face of the early 1830s. This was arrestingly bold and highly condensed, quite unlike the classical proportions of Caslon's design, but very suitable for poster typography and similar in aesthetic effect to

2698-920: The development of the modern humanist sans genre, especially designs intended to be particularly legible above all other design considerations. The category expanded greatly during the 1980s and 1990s, partly as a reaction against the overwhelming popularity of Helvetica and Univers and also due to the need for legible computer fonts on low-resolution computer displays. Designs from this period intended for print use include FF Meta , Myriad , Thesis , Charlotte Sans , Bliss , Skia and Scala Sans , while designs developed for computer use include Microsoft's Tahoma , Trebuchet , Verdana , Calibri and Corbel , as well as Lucida Grande , Fira Sans and Droid Sans . Humanist sans-serif designs can (if appropriately proportioned and spaced) be particularly suitable for use on screen or at distance, since their designs can be given wide apertures or separation between strokes, which

2769-603: The earliest humanist designs was Edward Johnston 's Johnston typeface from 1916, and, a decade later, Gill Sans ( Eric Gill , 1928). Edward Johnston, a calligrapher by profession, was inspired by classic letter forms, especially the capital letters on the Column of Trajan . Humanist designs vary more than gothic or geometric designs. Some humanist designs have stroke modulation (strokes that clearly vary in width along their line) or alternating thick and thin strokes. These include most popularly Hermann Zapf 's Optima (1958),

2840-462: The early twentieth century, an increase in popularity of sans-serif typefaces took place as more artistic sans-serif designs were released. While he disliked sans-serif typefaces in general, the American printer J. L. Frazier wrote of Copperplate Gothic in 1925 that "a certain dignity of effect accompanies   ... due to the absence of anything in the way of frills", making it a popular choice for

2911-409: The eccentricities of some of the early sans-serif types. According to Monotype, the term "grotesque" originates from Italian : grottesco , meaning "belonging to the cave" due to their simple geometric appearance. The term arose because of adverse comparisons that were drawn with the more ornate Modern Serif and Roman typefaces that were the norm at the time. Neo-grotesque designs appeared in

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2982-412: The fourth being the result of splitting the grotesque category into grotesque and neo-grotesque. This group features most of the early (19th century to early 20th) sans-serif designs. Influenced by Didone serif typefaces of the period and sign painting traditions, these were often quite solid, bold designs suitable for headlines and advertisements. The early sans-serif typefaces often did not feature

3053-405: The fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties" and "its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the   ... prettiness of Gill Sans". By the 1960s, neo-grotesque typefaces such as Univers and Helvetica had become popular through reviving the nineteenth-century grotesques while offering

3124-612: The high x-height of the Fraktur and Textura letters. Thus, too many German types have ascenders which are too long and descenders which are too short. The proportions of Optima Roman are now in the Golden Section: lowercase x-height equalling the minor and ascenders-descenders the major. However, the curved lines of the stems of each letter result from technical considerations of type manufacturing rather than purely esthetic considerations." The development of Optima occurred during

3195-459: The hygiene aisle." Humanist sans-serif In typography and lettering , a sans-serif , sans serif ( / ˈ s æ n ( z ) ˈ s ɛ r ɪ f / ), gothic , or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called " serifs " at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than serif typefaces. They are often used to convey simplicity and modernity or minimalism . For

3266-590: The leading expert on early revival of sans-serif letters, has found that architect John Soane commonly used sans-serif letters on his drawings and architectural designs. Soane's inspiration was apparently the inscriptions dedicating the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy , with minimal serifs. These were then copied by other artists, and in London sans-serif capitals became popular for advertising, apparently because of

3337-491: The mid-twentieth century as an evolution of grotesque types. They are relatively straightforward in appearance with limited stroke width variation. Similar to grotesque typefaces, neo-grotesques often feature capitals of uniform width and a quite 'folded-up' design, in which strokes (for example on the 'c') are curved all the way round to end on a perfect horizontal or vertical. Helvetica is an example of this. Unlike earlier grotesque designs, many were issued in large families from

3408-583: The monotony of all capital letters having a roughly square footprint, as he felt was true of some early sans-serif designs. Like the Roman capitals, Optima's 'E' and 'R' occupy about a half-square, the 'M' is wide and its sides are splayed. On the suggestion of Monroe Wheeler of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Zapf decided to adapt his typeface to be used as a book type. "He thereupon changed

3479-571: The names of those who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks , carved into bronze parapets, at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum , which is named "Reflecting Absence". More recently, was used by U.S. politician John McCain 's 2008 presidential campaign . Opinions on the design have been variable, partly because of its extensive use. Erik Spiekermann described it as "used on parking garages & hospitals across

3550-657: The original version, rather than the Optima nova design which represents Zapf's final thoughts on the design. In the Bitstream font collection, Zapf Humanist 601 is provided as an Optima clone. Other Optima clones include Optane from the WSI Fonts collection, Opulent by Rubicon Computer Labs Inc., Ottawa from Corel , CG Omega and Eterna. Freely available implementations include URW Classico (available with URW Font package from Ghostscript ). Linux Biolinum and Libertinus Sans are libre fonts inspired by it. Zapf's Palatino Sans

3621-723: The page comes much closer to that of the original metal version than any of the earlier photo/digital versions did" but that "ends of the strokes in the letters 'a', 'c', and 's' flare much more dramatically than they ever did in the older Optima — so much so that these letters almost look as though they have serifs...It’s a subtle difference, but it’s disturbing if you’re used to the understated elegance of Optima’s letterforms." A condensed variant which consists of light to bold weights, but no italic fonts. The glyph set does not support proportional lining figures, old style figures, or small caps. A titling capitals variant, which contains only capital letters, with restyled letterform. The glyph set

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3692-537: The period 1955–1958. Optima was first manufactured as a foundry version in 1958 by Stempel of Frankfurt, and by Mergenthaler in America shortly thereafter. It was released to the public at an exhibition in Düsseldorf the same year. Zapf himself wanted to name the new type face New Roman , but the marketing staff insisted that it be named Optima . In a memoir written for Linotype, Zapf commented: The name "Optima"

3763-613: The period, such as those authored by the Bauhaus art school (1919–1933) and modernist poster artists, were hand-lettered and not cut into metal type at the time. A separate inspiration for many types described "geometric" in design has been the simplified shapes of letters engraved or stenciled on metal and plastic in industrial use, which often follow a simplified structure and are sometimes known as "rectilinear" for their use of straight vertical and horizontal lines. Designs which have been called geometric in principles but not descended from

3834-463: The proportions of the lowercase, and by means of photography, he tested the suitability of the design for continuous reading application." Zapf designed the capital letters of Optima after the inscriptions on the Trajan Column (A.D. 113). Optima was the first German typeface not based on the standard baseline alignment. Zapf stated: "This base line is not ideal for a roman, as it was designed for

3905-473: The public, who had never seen letters like them and were not sure they wanted to". A depiction of the style, as an engraving, rather than printed from type, was shown in the European Magazine of 1805, described as "old Roman" characters. However, the style did not become used in printing for some more years. (Early sans-serif signage was not printed from type but hand-painted or carved, since at

3976-425: The purposes of type classification, sans-serif designs are usually divided into these major groups: § Grotesque , § Neo-grotesque , § Geometric , § Humanist , and § Other or mixed . Sans-serif typefaces have become the most prevalent for display of text on computer screens. On lower-resolution digital displays, fine details like serifs may disappear or appear too large. The term comes from

4047-515: The regular weight. Zapf retained an interest in the design, collaborating on variants and expansions into his eighties. Interested in calligraphy and the history of Italian printing and lettering, Zapf first visited Italy in 1950. While in Florence, Zapf was particularly interested in the design of the lettering in tombstones of the cemetery of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence , in which

4118-662: The representation of Etruscan epigraphy , and in c.  1745 , the Caslon foundry made Etruscan types for pamphlets written by Etruscan scholar John Swinton . Another niche used of a printed sans-serif letterform from 1786 onwards was a rounded sans-serif script typeface developed by Valentin Haüy for the use of the blind to read with their fingers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century neoclassicism led to architects increasingly incorporating ancient Greek and Roman designs in contemporary structures. Historian James Mosley ,

4189-427: The shapes are merely tilted to the right. In Optima nova, this is replaced by a true italic. (In interviews, Zapf has said that this was his original goal from the beginning, but the need to release Optima quickly forced him to settle for an oblique.) Even in Roman fonts, letters such as Q, a, f are redesigned. The overall bounding boxes were widened in Optima nova. Reviewing it, John Berry wrote that "its 'color' on

4260-742: The spirit of modernity, using the German slogan " die Schrift unserer Zeit " ("the typeface of our time") and in English "the typeface of today and tomorrow" ; many typefaces were released under its influence as direct clones, or at least offered with alternate characters allowing them to imitate it if desired. In the post-war period, an increase of interest took place in "grotesque" sans-serifs. Writing in The Typography of Press Advertisement (1956), printer Kenneth Day commented that Stephenson Blake's eccentric Grotesque series had returned to popularity for having "a personality sometimes lacking in

4331-450: The standard of common sans-serif types of the period, many of which now seem somewhat lumpy and eccentrically-shaped. In 1922, master printer Daniel Berkeley Updike described sans-serif typefaces as having "no place in any artistically respectable composing-room." In 1937 he stated that he saw no need to change this opinion in general, though he felt that Gill Sans and Futura were the best choices if sans-serifs had to be used. Through

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4402-480: The stationery of professionals such as lawyers and doctors. As Updike's comments suggest, the new, more constructed humanist and geometric sans-serif designs were viewed as increasingly respectable, and were shrewdly marketed in Europe and America as embodying classic proportions (with influences of Roman capitals) while presenting a spare, modern image. Futura in particular was extensively marketed by Bauer and its American distribution arm by brochure as capturing

4473-400: The strokes subtly widen as they reach stroke terminals without ending in a serif. He quickly sketched an early draft of the design on a 1000 lira banknote. Zapf was to work on the development of Optima during most of the following decade. In his book About Alphabets , Zapf commented that his key aim in designing Optima's capitals, inspired by the Roman capital model, was the desire to avoid

4544-570: The time it was not possible to print in large sizes. This makes tracing the descent of sans-serif styles hard, since a trend can arrive in the dated, printed record from a signpainting tradition which has left less of a record or at least no dates.) The inappropriateness of the name was not lost on the poet Robert Southey , in his satirical Letters from England written in the character of a Spanish aristocrat. It commented: "The very shopboards must be   ... painted in Egyptian letters, which, as

4615-492: The time of release. Neo-grotesque type began in the 1950s with the emergence of the International Typographic Style , or Swiss style. Its members looked at the clear lines of Akzidenz-Grotesk (1898) as an inspiration for designs with a neutral appearance and an even colour on the page. In 1957 the release of Helvetica , Univers , and Folio , the first typefaces categorized as neo-grotesque, had

4686-447: The typeface's body size, which equals to about 28 points. Although it is known from its appearances in the firm's specimen books, no uses of it from the period have been found; Mosley speculates that it may have been commissioned by a specific client. A second hiatus in interest in sans-serif appears to have lasted for about twelve years, until Vincent Figgins ' foundry of London issued a new sans-serif in 1828. David Ryan felt that

4757-463: The various font names. Thus, Linux Libertine became Libertinus Serif, Linux Biolinum became Libertinus Sans, and Linux Libertine Mono became Libertinus Mono. His new mathematical font is called Libertinus Math. While working on the mathematical companion, Hosny fixed many technical issues of the already existing fonts. This led him to a complete fork of Linux Libertine, not just adding a complementing typeface to it. Since Linux Libertine's releases came to

4828-764: The work of Zapf's friend Herb Lubalin , especially the exuberant ligatures (for which Lubalin's ITC Lubalin Graph and ITC Avant Garde are notable). Further influence of A.M. Cassandre and Rudolf Koch , whose work greatly inspired the young Zapf, can also be seen in Optima. In April 2010, Linotype announced the release of Cyrillic version of the original Optima family, in OpenType Pro font formats. Released fonts include Optima Pro Cyrillic Roman, Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique. As with many commonly used fonts, knockoff designs and re-releases under different names have been released, some created by Zapf himself. These all tend to copy

4899-439: Was not my idea at all. It is for me too presumptuous and was the invention of the sales people at Stempel. Zapf wrote later in his life of his preference for Optima over all of his other typefaces, but he also mentioned “a father should not have a favorite among his daughters.” Optima's design follows humanist lines; its capitals (like those of Palatino , Hans Eduard Meier's Syntax and Carol Twombly's Trajan ) originate from

4970-543: Was often used for headings and commercial printing, many early sans-serif designs did not feature lower-case letters. Simple sans-serif capitals, without use of lower-case, became very common in uses such as tombstones of the Victorian period in Britain. The first use of sans-serif as a running text has been proposed to be the short booklet Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: eine Betrachtung des Theaters als höchsten Kultursymbols (Celebration of Life and Art: A Consideration of

5041-658: Was originally an oblique or sloped roman, in which the letters do not take on handwriting characteristics. For Optima nova (discussed below) Zapf decided to create a new true italic with a greater slant angle. During late development of Optima, Zapf also began working on a non-modulated sans for Linotype, to be named Magnus and intended to compete with Gill Sans . It has never been released. A Greek variant designed by Matthew Carter , based on sketches from Hermann Zapf. No digital versions have been produced. A variant designed by Matthew Carter , based closely on Optima Medium. No digital versions have been produced. "Optima nova"

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