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 the ITC Zapf Book™ typeface family, which was released in the spring of 1976. So I will… carefully prepare my alphabet proposal for my new relationship with ITC…. In Zapf’s words, “The system worked out by ITC is the only way to get better conditions for type designers. Upon returning home to Germany, Zapf wrote to Burns of his intention to design a new text typeface – which he would offer to ITC.

At their meeting, Burns was able to convince Zapf of the soundness of ITC’s business philosophy. Three years later, on a cool October morning, Zapf visited Burns in his New York office. The company was built on the principle that it would license typeface designs on a non-exclusive basis to any company that agreed to a relatively basic and straightforward business relationship. Zapf’s re-emergence into type design began when Aaron Burns founded International Typeface Corporation in 1971. Over a decade passed before a new typeface of his was released. In the mid-1960s, Zapf stopped designing commercial typefaces.

After seeing this happen time and again, Zapf concluded that it was not intelligent – or profitable – to continue his career designing typefaces for others to plagiarize. Since his designs were – and still are – a vital component of any well-planned typographic offering, Linotype’s competition commonly produced virtual clones of Zapf’s typefaces to provide to their customers. These typefaces were designed for Linotype at a time when type foundries chose not to cross-license their designs. The Palatino®, Optima®, and Melior® typefaces are just some of the designs Zapf created early in his career.

After a 10-year hiatus, Hermann Zapf began designing typefaces again in 1976 – and the first were announced in volume three of U&lc.

Zapf chancery the office