Hermann Zapf

Recent articles about Hermann Zapf

From punch cutters to number crunchers

Issue 94, Summer 2017

Feature

In the summer of 1983, a Stanford seminar became a milestone in the long transition from craft to code

The line of beauty

Issue 83, Summer 2012

Feature

Script typefaces, currently enjoying an unprecedented popularity, bring a vital element of humanity to the digital age. By Paul Shaw and Abby Goldstein

The digital wave

Issue 7, Summer 1992

Feature

The old manufacturing companies that dominated typeface production through most of this century have been swallowed and largely pushed to the sidelines, while initiatives in design – and in the terms and routines that condition design – have been made by a few rapidly growing software and computer hardware companies. Pathbreaking contributions have come from small studios or individual designers working, in every sense, from just a desktop. There have been ‘font wars’, corporate piracy and copyright contravention on a large scale. To use the loose terminology by which we attempt to carve up typographic history, it is clear that during the 1980s, the developed world left behind photographic typography (to which metal had ceded) and entered the era of the ‘digital’