Zapfino

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Examples of Zapfino font styles
Zapfino as a font for outdoor advertising

Zapfino is a typeface family designed by Hermann Zapf and named after him. Zapfino has a total of 18 font weights . The Zapfino is classified as a cursive script (group VIII) in accordance with DIN 16518 .

Main features

Characteristic of all characters of the Zapfino font styles is the unusual and artistic handwritten representation. What is striking about the font styles of the Zapfino family is the wealth of variants of the individual characters and their seamless and flowing combinability with one another. A text set in Zapfino appears very lively and varied, almost like the handwriting of a calligrapher . The font weights of the Zapfino family are very popular for designing documents on festive occasions, such as B. wedding invitations, menu cards , etc. Ä.

history

Hermann Zapf's first ideas for a typeface family like Zapfino go back to the 1940s in the form of sketches. But it was not until 1993 that Zapf began to work intensively on a calligraphically sophisticated and varied font family. In 1998, Zapf, in collaboration with the Linotype typeface design and development team, completed the first edition of Zapfino in six typefaces ( Zapfino One , Two , Three , Four , Ligatures , Ornaments ). In addition to the z. Partly extensive swings of the individual characters and their ligatures, especially the variety of ornaments.

Zapfino was awarded the Type Designers Club's 1999 design prize.

The following is a typeface Zapfino was the operating system Mac OS X from Apple settled as a system font, which helped her to widespread and a lot of attention,

Inspired by the great success of the first Zapfino family, but not least inspired by the technical possibilities of the emerging OpenType format, Zapf, now at the age of 85, set about completing the Zapfino family together with Linotype's Type Director Akira Kobayashi to be revised and expanded considerably. The result was the twelve font weights of the Zapfino Extra family ( Zapfino Extra Regular , One , Two , Three , Four , Alternate , SmallCaps , Ligatures , Ornaments , Zapfino Extra Forte , Forte One , Forte Alternate ).

The Zapfino Extra family uses a. a mechanism of the OpenType format, the so-called contextual features , which make it possible to automatically represent the same character in a different context using one of several variants of the character. This means that typesetting programs that support the use of contextual features make the entire range of variants of the Zapfino Extra font family available to the user in a simple manner. This includes the use of the ligatures that are abundant in Zapfino.

Since the density of the screen display under Mac OS X was not 96 dpi (as is usual under Windows), but 72 dpi and therefore the standard Zapfino fonts were displayed at different basic heights on these computers, Linotype felt compelled to use all 12 styles of the Zapfino extra family addition as an enlarged version under the name Zapfino extra X bring out.

Web links

Commons : Zapfino  - collection of images, videos and audio files