B
orn and raised in Los Angeles on March 19,1992 to Roxana & Gume Diaz I would live an average life. I am the oldest of 4 so the role of responsibility was one I grew up quite familiar with. Throughout my whole life I’ve always had in interest in art. Painting, drawing and the over all proccess of creating was something I loved to
indulge in. I’ve never had any formal training in the arts until my junior year of highschool. In 2010 I founded a clothing company called RILA which stands for Raised In los Angeles. Since becoming a self proclaimed designer I decided to enroll at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in L.A. to study graphic design.
Hermann Zapf
Z
apf, Zapf, Zapf, the wonderful mind behind the dingbats. Hermann Zapf was born in 1918 in Nuremberg, Germany during a time of political unrest between Munich and Berlin. During this time there was also a Spanish flu epidemic that killed nearly 20 million people including two of Zapf’s siblings. Zapf is a world-renowned typeface designer and designed his first typeface when he was 20 years old called Gilgengart. Due to the political problems in his hometown, Zapf was not able to attend his school of choice the Ohm Technical Institute so he found an apprenticeship. In February 1934 Zapf began his four-year apprenticeship as a retoucher. After Zapf attended an exhibition in honor of typographer Rudolf Koch, he suddenly had an interest in lettering. He self taught himself calligraphy. He got so good he would even make improvements on his colleagues retouching work. He became so good his friends jokingly called him
The Emperor of Calligraphy. Zapf has designed for letterpress printing, photosetting and digital typesetting. Zapf has achieved something extraordinary, he invented new shapes by creating new interpretations of already existing shapes. Zapf has designed over 200 typefaces. His most popular typefaces include Palatino, Optima, and Zapf Dingbats. His favorite font that he created was Optima, which to him was some sort of a typographical Platypus and by no means an optimal font. In 1997 Zapf was made professor of Typographic Computer Programming at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. You can find Zapf’s fonts everywhere. There’s no escaping them. Optima was even selected as the font for the engraved names on the Vietnam War Memorial. There is no doubt that Hermann Zapf is a true innovator a and modern day renaissance man he will forever be a staple in the world of typography.
Popular fonts designed by Hermann Zapf ✹Aldus ✹Edison ✹Grotesk ✹Kompakt ✹Optima ✹Palatino
Optima is seen in McCains logo used in the 2008 Presidential election
✹ITC Zapf Chancery ✹Zapf Dingbats ✹Zapf Renaissance ✹Zapfino ✹Linotype
Here is another example of Optima used for the names of soldiers who faught in the Vientnam War.