IES Puerta Bonita • Madrid
100 AÑOS DE SU NACIMIENTO
Semana de Producción 2018
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
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HOMENAJE a Hermann Zapf
IES PUERTA BONITA Semana de Producciรณn 2018
Título original: Homenaje a Hermann Zapf ©2018 by Juan Martínez-Val All right reserved © por la traducción, Juan Martínez-Val, 2018 © Editorial Puerta Bonita, 2018 Coordinación: Eva Sánchez Corrección: Carmen Sánchez Primera Edición: febrero, 2018 Depósito legal: B. 23.510-2017 ISBN: 967-14-36-64811-3 Composición y diseño: Carolina Navarrete, Lucía Fernández, Eva Sánchez y Sandra Gallego Impresión y encuadernación: Puerta Bonita Impreso en España
Edición no venal con fines pedagógicos. Los derechos comerciales y morales de los autores de los textos y de las fotografías deben ser respetados en todas las ediciones.
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í ndice Autobiografía Biografía
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The Lifestory of Hermann Zapf
Herman Zapf (Autobiography)
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’ve been asked to tell you about myself and my types. My story begins in Nuremberg, where I was born on 8 November 1918. Those were turbulent days. On the day I was born, a workers’ and soldiers’ council took political control of the city. Munich and Berlin were rocked by revolution. The war ended, and the Republic was declared in Berlin on 9 November 1918. The next day Kaiser Wilhelm fled to Holland. To add to the chaos, the Spanish flu took hold of Europe in 1918 and 1919. It is estimated to have killed some 20 million people, more lives than were lost by Germany and the Allies put together during the First World War. Two of my siblings died in the flu epidemic of 1918. The school years Then famine hit Germany, reaching its peak in 1920. In 1925 my mother was relieved to send me to school, where I received a Quaker meal each day, a program organized by Herbert Hoover, who later became President of the USA. During my school years I was primarily interested in technical subjects. The librarian in my local library was surprised by all the things I wanted to read. One of my favorite books was the annual “Das neue Universum” (“The New Universe”), which was a wonderful way of 9
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acquainting oneself with all the latest inventions and discoveries. One of the things I did during those years was to build a detector radio, otherwise known as a crystal set, together with my brother, who was four years my senior. At night we listened to the radio under the bedclothes. Of course we had to keep all our antics a secret from our parents. To ensure that we could do what we liked without being found out, we set up various warning systems in the house - with door handle contacts and the like, low voltage of course. Our master system worked perfectly, sounding a warning bell in the cellar as soon as the garden gate was opened. This went on until the day my father discovered the wires whilst digging in the garden. Even during those early years, I was already getting involved with types. I invented the strangest forms of secret writing to enable us to exchange information. They were some kind of cross between Germanic runes and Cyrillic, and could only be deciphered if you knew the code. This was around 1930. My despairing mother could not make head nor tail of them. That’s over 70 years ago now, and I suppose they constituted my first alphabetic creations. When I left school in 1933 my ambition was to become an electrical engineer. But in early 1933 my father became unemployed and he had terrible trouble with the new regime. Prior to 1933 my father had been too involved with the unions and in March of that year he was sent to the camp Dachau for a short time. Given the new political circumstances, I was not allowed to attend the Ohm Technical Institute in Nuremberg. Not until 30 years later in the USA was I able to fulfill the dreams of my youth with computer technology. So I had to find an apprenticeship. Since I was good at drawing, my teachers -who were aware of our political problems - suggested that I should become a lithographer. It was 10 months later, in 1934, before I found an apprenticeship. Every time I went for an interview, I was asked political questions. I was told that they liked my work, but couldn’t take me on. The last company in the telephone directory was the only one that didn’t ask Autobiografía 10
me any political questions. They too said that my work was good, but they didn’t do lithography and didn’t need an apprentice lithographer. Instead, they said I could become a retoucher, and could start on the following Monday. I accepted straight away, and rushed home on my bike to consult the dictionary and find out what a retoucher was. And so I became a retoucher, starting my 4-year apprenticeship in February 1934. In 1935 there was an exhibition in the Norishalle in Nuremberg in memory of the Nuremberger Rudolf Koch (1876-1934). He passed away on 9 April 1934. It was at this exhibition that I first became interested in lettering. I bought Koch’s book “Das Schreiben als Kunstfertigkeit” (“The Art of Writing”) and a textbook about lettering by Edward Johnston, “Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering”. Using these two books, I taught myself calligraphy at home using a broad-edged pen. I studied historical examples in the Nuremberg city library. It didn’t take long before my master discovered that I was good at calligraphy. After that I was mainly given lettering retouching work to do and often had to work overtime improving my colleagues’ retouching work. I rarely got home before 8 p.m.. My parents were angry but of course they couldn’t do anything about it.
Note the three letters in a type stick, Drawing, Herman Zapf, 1954
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When it came to taking the journeyman’s examination at the trade corporation in 1938, my father said I should refuse to sit it because I was made to do so many other tasks during my apprenticeship. In a time when absolute obedience was paramount, such a decision would have caused a lot of problems. It was unthinkable to do otherwise. On the day I finished my apprenticeship, I handed in my notice and a few days later went to Frankfurt - without a journeyman’s certificate. I wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a work permit for another company in Nuremberg. They could check up on everything using the so-called labor-book that everyone had to have. In Frankfurt I went to the “Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck”, which was run by Paul Koch, son of Rudolf Koch. The Haus zum Fürsteneck was a beautiful building dating from around 1360. It stood on the Weckmarkt corner of the Fahrgasse. It was completely destroyed during the 1944 air raids on Frankfurt. Most of my time there was spent in typography and writing songbooks. I learned a lot during my time at the Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck. All my colleagues were specialists covering a wide range of subjects. One of the hallmarks of Paul Koch was his musical notation printing on the manual press. It was through the print historian Gustav Mori that I first came into contact with the D. Stempel AG type foundry and Linotype GmbH in Frankfurt. It was for them that I designed my first printed type in 1938, a fraktur type called “Gilgengart”.
Glingengart I and II, Typography, Herman Zapf, 1954 Autobiografía 12
On 1 April 1939 I was called up to reinforce the Siegfried Line against France near Pirmasens. I wasn’t used to the hard labor, my hand being skilled in the use of a brush rather than a heavy spade. After a few weeks I developed heart trouble and was sent to the writing room. There I wrote out the camp records and sports certificates in my best fraktur letters. In early September 1939, when war had broken out and the entire unit was to be taken into the Wehrmacht, I was informed that unfortunately, due to my heart complaint, I was not going to be transferred, but would be dismissed. I was not at all sad about this, it was my comrades who were sad about having to stay at the French border. But again on 1 April - in 1942 and not an April fool’s joke in sight - the Prussians summoned me to do my bit for the war effort. They were not sending me to the airforce, for which I had been selected, but instead to the artillery in Weimar. That’s just the way it is in the army. I had problems with my superiors from day one. During training I often confused my left and my right, a problem which I still have today. To make matters worse, I was over-cautious and very clumsy with my gun. I soon had the officers in a state of despair and brought a premature end to my career in the artillery. I was no longer welcome on the parade ground. I was first sent back to the office and then to Jüterbog to train as a cartographer. From there I went to Dijon and then on to Bordeaux to the staff of the 1st Army. In Bordeaux I drew secret maps of Spain, especially of the railway networks, from Irun on the French border near Biarritz down to La Linea in southern Spain. The plan was to conquer Gibraltar from the land side using heavy railway artillery. But Franco, that sly fox, mistrusted his “friend” Adolfo and only used narrow gauge tracks to repair the railway bridges destroyed during the civil war. Of course these tracks were of no use to the mighty railway artillery. I was quite happy in the cartography unit. But these backup units were forever being combed for young soldiers who could be commissioned. We called it “stealing heroes”. Being only 25 years old, my turn eventually came. But my officer in the cartography unit was anxious to keep me, and sang the praises of my special skill for drawing maps 13
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of Spain. While he was speaking, I took a fine brush and wrote out the general’s name without glasses or a magnifying glass. He took a close look at it, and his monocle fell off. Without a word of praise he continued on his way, and I remained the youngest cartographer in the German army. So you see the fateful effects that letters 1 mm large can have. I had a reasonable amount of free time in Bordeaux and was able to do some work in my sketch book. In 1944 in Bordeaux I wrote out Hans von Weber’s “Junggesellentext” , which would be reproduced in its original size over 50 years later when Linotype was showing Zapfino®.
Zapfino, Typography, Herman Zapf, 1954
The amazing thing is that I didn’t need glasses or even a magnifying glass back then to write such small letters. What excellent eyesight I had! At the end of the war I was held by the French as a prisoner of war in a field hospital in Tübingen. I was treated very well and they even let me keep my drawing instruments. They had a great deal of respect for me as an “artiste” and I think the French still have this respect today. Since I was in very poor health, the French sent me home just four weeks after the end of the war. I first went back to my parents in my home town of Nuremberg, which had suffered terrible damage. It took a very long time before life in the city returned to normal. Autobiografía 14
I gave my first calligraphy lesson in Nuremberg in 1946. There were hardly any teachers in Nuremberg who were politically untainted. The lessons were part of a program aimed at building the German Federation of Trade Unions. We wrote out our letters in an old school building under very primitive circumstances. The classroom had almost no glass in the windows, some of which had merely been papered over, and we had to work by artificial light. The light bulbs had to be returned to the caretaker after the lesson. After all, they were in short supply in 1946. In 1947 I went back to Frankfurt, where the Stempel type foundry had offered me a position as artistic head of the in-house printshop. I was not yet 30 years of age. I was not asked for qualifications, journeyman’s certificates, or references. All I had to do was show them my 3 sketch books from the war, which contained my drawings and writings, and the calligraphic piece I mentioned earlier.
Alphabets and Pages of Calligraphy A noteworthy product of those post-war years, when we worked in truly miserable conditions, is the publication “Feder und Stichel” (“Pen and Graver”) The 25 plates were cut in metal by the punch cutter August Rosenberger. I designed them between 1939 and 1941 and Rosenberger cut them during the air raids on Frankfurt - just imagine! He was one of the great masters of his trade. In 1949 the book was printed in the printshop at D. Stempel AG. Between 1948 and 1950 I gave calligraphy lessons at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach, which is now the School of Design. I was not the class teacher for calligraphy, that was the job of my friend Karlgeorg Hoefer. I only taught lettering twice a week to the two classes of graphics students. In 1951 I married Gudrun von Hesse. She was a teacher at the Städel school in Frankfurt. Suspicious minds might believe that I was marrying away the competition, just as big companies do today. But there’s no truth in that. I think my wife demonstrated her remarka 15
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ble independence and artistic skills at her exhibition “Bucheinbände Graphische Arbeiten - Alphabete für Druckschriften” (“Book Binding - Graphic Design - Alphabets for Printing Types”) in Darmstadt in the autumn of 1998. My main work as a graphic artist involved book design for publishing houses. I worked for Suhrkamp, Insel, the Book Guild Gutenberg in Frankfurt, Hanser in Munich, Dr. Ludwig Reichert in Wiesbaden, Philipp von Zabern in Mainz and various other publishers. As a matter of principle I did not work for advertising agencies. Other important areas of activity included the development of printing types, such as Palatino, Optima, etc., alphabets for hot metal composition, then for phototypsetting, and finally for the digital resolution of types. You’re sure to find some of my types on your Mac or PC.
Palatino,Typography, Herman Zapf, 1948
The Palatino alphabet was designed after many careful studies together with the punchcutter August Rosenberger. Even such small details as the serifs were carefully scrutinized. In 1948 tests in offset printing were made, especially in connection with the weight of the serifs. You see how important such serifs are. The type Palatino is named after the Italian writing master of the 16th century Giambattista Palatino. I hope he will forgive me once a day in heaven and give me his blessing in using his good name. I had no intention of disturbing his fame. Optima, designed in 1952, was released 1958 by the D. Stempel AG typefoundry in Frankfurt. It is an unusual sans-serif type. The letters were based on the Golden Section and developed after studies Autobiografía 16
and sketches done in Italy in 1950. It is an alphabet design between a Roman (like Bodoni) and a sans-serif (like Futura). Optima was first intended as a display face. But after showing proofs in 1954 to Monroe Wheeler of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, I followed his suggestion to correct the design into a text type, to later have an opportunity to replace sans-serif alphabets in art books, magazines and other publications. The name “Optima” was not my idea at all. It is for me too presumptious and was the invention of the sales people at Stempels. It goes without saying that life is not always easy for a freelance graphic artist. You have bad times as well as good. I used the bad times to do calligraphic work for myself.
Optima, Typography, Herman Zapf, 1952-1955
During all those years, I only had a few calligraphic jobs. The biggest was writing out the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations in 4 languages, including Russian. That was in 1960 for the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and I was paid 1000 dollars. That was a lot of money in those days. A copy of this work has been on display since 1993 in my permanent exhibition in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. In the sixties the radical move from the Gutenberg principle towards typesetting production began. It started with phototypesetting and then went digital when Dr. Rudolf Hell invented the Digiset photocomposition machine in 1964. I have witnessed and participated in all the stages of type production. From hot metal composition in the fifties, to phototypesetting, 17
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and through to today’s digital methods. It’s been an exciting time with all the radical changes that the printing industry has seen. Since the early 1960s, I have been working on the use of typography in computer programs. When you are a book designer, you are always looking for ways of simplifying production. In particular you need precise typesetting details, for which I was well known among the publishers. But there was also room for improvement in the technical process. At first my ideas about computer-aided typesetting were not taken seriously in Germany and were even rejected at the Technical University in Darmstadt, where I lectured in typography from 1972 to 1981. The director of a major company - which is no longer in existence - thought that it was unrealistic to apply modular structures to typesetting with the aid of a computer. “That Zapf is crazy”, he said, as I later discovered, and I should stay with alphabets. Of course nobody could have predicted that computerized typography would be the order of the day a few years later. These days computers are run-of-the-mill. Even children of pre-school age are playing with them. Since nobody wanted to hear my ideas in Germany, I had no choice but to go to the USA. People were more open to such new and unconventional things over there. The Americans still have something of their old pioneering spirit. In my lectures there I developed my ideas about computerized typesetting programs. My moment came when I was invited to speak to the students in the Carpenter Center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1964. That got the University of Texas in Austin interested too. They made me a very generous offer and offered to create a special professorship for me. The Governor made me an Honorary Citizen of Texas - which might have exempted me from taxes - and presented me with a huge flag of the State of Texas, which had once flown over the Capitol building in Austin. Moreover, Austin is a very attractive university town, and is nothing like the way one otherwise pictures Texan cities like Houston. Back home I told my wife the whole story. She listened patiently. Then she said that was all fine and well, but she would never go to Autobiografía 18
Texas. Unfortunately my wife had only seen Texas from the air, when we had once flown over those endless oil fields on our way to San Diego. So that was the end of my Texan dream. Since the American plan had come to nothing and our house in Frankfurt had become too small - even though I had my studio in the old city gate building in Dreieichenhain, which dates from 1460 - we took the opportunity to move to Darmstadt in 1972. Princess Margaret of Hessen had a plan to revive the tradition of the Ernst Ludwig Press, under the name “Prince Ludwig Press” in memory of her husband, who died in 1966. Dr. Dolf Sternberger was to be in charge of the literary part and I was to be responsible for equipment and printing. Unfortunately the project never got off the ground for want of funds. We had all known from the start that it would not generate any profits. In 1976, the Rochester Institute of Technology asked me whether I would take over from Professor Alexander Lawson when he retired. They wanted to set up a special professorship for typographic computer programming, the first of its kind in the world. I taught there from 1977 until 1987, flying back and forth between Darmstadt and Rochester. In Rochester I got the chance to develop my ideas further, particularly once I had connentions with companies like IBM and Xerox through my students. I also learned a great deal from the computer specialists during our discussions, which often continued into the night. In 1977 my friends Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and I founded “Design Processing International Inc.” in New York. The aim was to develop programs for typographic structures based on a variable menu and for use by non-specialists. The company existed until 1986. After the death of Herb Lubalin, we started afresh, setting up “Zapf, Burns & Company” in New York in 1987. Sadly in 1991 my partner Aaron Burns died of AIDS, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion during a heart operation in 1982. He had been responsible for our marketing. To add to his troubles, two of our employees had stolen my ideas and started a company of own shortly before his death. 19
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That was the last straw for Burns, and a terrible experience for both of us. Of course it was not practical for me to run a company in the USA from Darmstadt. I couldn’t even take legal action but I didn’t want to move to New York. Anyone who has seen our house on the Rosenhöhe in Darmstadt will understand why. I put all the experience I had gathered in the USA into developing a new and very ambitious composition program for the improvement of typesetting quality. We called it the “hz program”. I developed it in conjunction with URW Software & Type GmbH in Hamburg. It is still not quite finished because we are forever trying to get new things out of the existing basic structure. Computer technology is developing at a breathtaking pace and it’s difficult to keep up. But let’s get back to types. In the last few years I have only added to my existing Palatino type, using Greek and Cyrillic characters in particular. That was for Microsoft. The type now has over 1200 figures per style, including all the foreign character sets. Next came Zapfino Script, of which Linotype GmbH produced a poster on my birthday in 1998. The story of Zapfino® goes back to 1993. I had just completed an extensive project with Donald Knuth and David Siegel at Stanford University for the American Mathematical Society. We had developed a typeface for mathematical composition incorporating fraktur, Greek, and so on. It was particularly interesting to work with Donald Knuth, Professor of Computer Programming at Stanford. David Siegel had just completed his studies at Stanford, and had time on his hands. He wanted to get into the type business, and approached me for help. He was an extremely bright fellow, but little eccentric too. He wrote to me, saying that he had a fantastic idea which involved a new kind of typeface which had to have a large number of variations. It was all part of an art chaos program, which was a popular theme among the students at Stanford at that time. David Siegel wanted to start at once in taking a calligraphic example which I reproduced in a publication by the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago. This was the wrong way to go; I was very worried about it. Autobiografía 20
While I was interested in working on a complicated program, I was a little concerned about starting something new. But then I remembered the page of calligraphy in my sketch book from 1944. Perhaps now was my chance to make a typeface out of it. I had tried to do just that with the Virtuosa script for D. Stempel AG back in 1948, but the result was only a compromise. Hot metal composition placed too many limitations on the freedom of the swash characters. It was only with modern digital technology that I achieved the pleasing result you can see today. For the digitization of the project, David Siegel took on Gino Lee, a programmer from Boston, who was bursting with enthusiasm from the very beginning, and was even prepared to move to Palo Alto. It was a pleasure to work with him, and I hardly had to correct his work at all. But just when everything was nearly done, I received a sad letter from Dave Siegel. His girlfriend had left him. He had no interest in anything anymore. No more types for him. It was all I could do to convince him not to take his own life. After all, I said, there are plenty more pretty girls in California, and elsewhere besides. He said he wanted to make a new life for himself, but unfortunately he had almost entirely lost interest in the complicated software on which we had worked so hard together. In any case, it would never work as the lucky-chance program, called “Derrik”,we had first intended, at least not in the early 90s. There would have been far too much programming involved. David Siegel turned to something quite different - introducing color to Macintosh computers. Purple, green, even marble or wood grain. More recently he has become an Internet design expert. Those of you in the business may have read his book, “Secrets of Successful Web Sites”. With all these ups and downs, the development of Zapfino had been seriously delayed. That was until I plucked up the courage to show the project to Linotype, who were prepared to complete it. Linotype put the whole thing into some semblance of order. We eventually agreed on 4 alphabets, throwing some letters out and adding a few 21
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new ones. At the end we still had to include 100 ornaments, pen flourishes, index characters, etc. Index characters are usually black hands, but Zapfino has ladies’ hands as pointers. This is not a concession to women’s lib on my part.
Secrets of successful website, Book, David Siegel, 1997
I think I used such symbols for the first time ever in Dingbats which I designed for the International Typeface Corporation in New York. And now a few notes about my experience in the movie business. The film “The Art of Hermann Zapf” was produced in 1967 at Hallmark Cards Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri and in my design studio in Dreieichenhain, Germany. There was also a German version made by Linotype with the title “Die Welt der Buchstaben”. This has for several years been the name of my permanent exhibition at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, a beautiful old library, famous for their manuscripts and books. Autobiografía 22
It was the idea of Hallmark to make an educational film to be lent to art schools and TV stations. The beginning of this interesting project was very difficult. I was not at all familiar with the Hollywood English of the movie people, so I had to learn that first. Our cameraman, Frank Robinson by name, came from Hawaii. He was used to big outdoor scenes with professional models. He spoke in his Polynesian accent only of shooting and takes in connection with my story board, of stills he wanted to include, etc., demonstrating his ideas with sweeping gestures. My God, very quickly I realized we had absolutely different conceptions about the film. I wanted no outdoor shootings at all, no expensive movie stars. I wanted to show only single letters, my paw manipulating a broad-edged pen, and for the letterforms, close-ups to explain the movement of the pen. In addition, I wanted special close-ups through a glass on which I would write. Turning the film during copying will make it look like as though I was writing on air. At once my friends at Hallmark had a new term for this: frog views. How could I tell my thoughts to a wild man from the film business? But the frog view idea persuaded him and suddenly he said: Great, Hermann, let’s start tomorrow. I would like to add just one detail of the making of the film. After long discussions and the help of a lot of alcohol we started late in the night. I was sitting at a slanted glass table with a hot spotlight in my neck. Frank Robinson was lying on the floor with the camera ready for a frog-view shot. My task was to write beautiful letters with ink which dried as soon the pen touched the slippery surface of an astralon sheet. Not an easy job at all with a nervous cameraman at your feet. But with whiskey and many words of praise at the end, we all finished the film. It was a painful experience and I swore never to burn my fingers as a pseudo Hollywood production manager, but to stay with my humble pen and design alphabets.
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Biog Hermann Zapf (Pedro Arilla)
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Biografía
ermann Zapf nace el 8 de noviembre de 1918 en Núremberg (Alemania); era una de las leyendas vivas de la tipografía mundial junto a, seguramente, Adrian Frutiger (Unterseen, Suiza, 24 de marzo de 1928) y Mathew Carter (Londres, Reino Unido, 1 de octubre de 1937). Maestro calígrafo, diseñador de tipos, artista y profesor. Falleció el 4 de junio de 2015 a la edad de 96 años. Sus tipos incluyen las fuentes redondas y cursivas: Aldus (1954), Comenius (1976), Euler (1983), Hunt Roman (1962), Marconi (1976), Melior (1952), Optima (1958), Orion (1974), Palatino (1950), Zapf Book (1976) y Zapf Reinaissance (1984); las góticas: Gilgengart (1941), Winchester y Stratford; las fuentes para encabezados: Kompakt (1954), Michelangelo (1950), Sistina (1959) y Zapf International (1976); las griegas: Attika (1953), Heraklit (1954), y Phidias (1958); las fuentes caligráficas: Venture (1969), Zapf Chancery (1979), Zapf Civilité (1984) y Zapfino (1998); las viñetas recogidas en Zapf Dingbats (1978).
Hermann Zapf estaba casado con la también calígrafa y diseñadora de tipos Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. Sus tipografías son de un marcado estilo clásico y están influidas notablemente por la caligrafía, siendo uno de los representantes más brillantes de la cultura tipográfica tradicional. Fue un prolífico diseñador de tipos para los diferentes sis-
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temas de composición que se fueron sucediendo durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En 1934 comienza un aprendizaje de 4 años como corrector en la imprenta Karl Ulrich & Co. y es en 1935 cuando se interesa por la caligrafía después de visitar una exposición itinerante de los trabajos del tipógrafo Rudolf Koch y de leer los libros The Skill of Calligraphy del propio Rudolf Koch y Writing, Illuminating and Lettering de Edward Johnston. En el año 1938, después de su aprendizaje, comienza a trabajar en el taller de Paul Koch en Fráncfort estudiando al mismo tiempo el arte de la imprenta y la grabación de punzones junto al maestro grabador August Rosenberg. Con la colaboración de Rosenberg, Zapf produce un libro de 25 alfabetos caligráficos, titulado Pen and Graver, y que fue publicado por Stempel en 1949; y es que fue seguramente el prestigio que había logrado como calígrafo el que le valió, poco después de terminar la II Guerra Mundial y a pesar de su juventud, para ser nombrado director artístico de Stempel. Hermann Zapf trabajó para fundiciones como Stempel, Linotype, Hell, ITC y Bitstream; y para los rediseños y ampliaciones de sus tipos más destacados ha contado con la colaboración de Akira Kobayashi. En 1977, Zapf, junto a Aaron Burns y Herb Lubalin, fundó Design Processing International, Inc. en Nueva York donde desarrollaron un software de diseño tipográfico. Esta compañía existió hasta 1986 que murió Lubalin, y Zapf y Burns fundaron Zapf, Burns & Company en 1987 que funcionó hasta la muerte de 1992 de Burns. En la actualidad, con 96 años, todavía permanecía activo creando nuevas tipografías; y antes de su muerte estaba trabajando en la Zapfino Arabic que desarrollaba junto a Nadine Chahine. El trabajo de Zapf ha sido ampliamente admirado pero sus diseños han sido repetidamente plagiados, considerándose Palatino el tipo de letra más replicado del siglo XX. El ejemplo más conocido es el de Monotype Book Antiqua, que se distribuye con Microsoft Office y es considerada una copia de la Palatino. En 1993 Zapf abandonó la ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), por considerar que esta organización mantenía una actitud hipócrita con respecto la copia desautorizada por miembros prominentes de ATypI. En 1999, Microsoft traBiografía 26
bajó junto a Zapf y Linotype para desarrollar una nueva y autorizada versión de Palatino para Microsoft llamada Palatino Linotype. Zapf recibió en vida infinidad de reconocimientos internacionales, entre los que destaca La Orden del Mérito de la República Federal de Alemania por «contribuir de forma excepcional al desarrollo de la tipografía». En la ceremonia de entrega se recordó cómo Zapf aceptó como calígrafo en 1960 realizar el Preámbulo de la Carta Magna de Naciones Unidas en cuatro idiomas.
Imposición de la Cruz del Mérito
El maestro alemán también nos dejó un vasto legado en forma de artículos y libros sobre el diseño, el dibujo de letras y la tipografía. Entre otros, podemos destacar los libros: Manuale tipographicum (1954), About alphabets, some marginal notes on type design (1960), Typographische Variationen (1963), Hunt Roman, the birth of a type (1965), Orbis Typographicus (1980) y Poetry Through Typography (1993). Hermann Zapf escribió para Linotype su autobiografía en la que relata brevemente su vida personal y tipográfica. El último proyecto sobre el maestro alemán es la campaña de Kickstarter que The Kelly-Winterton Press había lanzado hace unas semanas para reproducir su libreta de bocetos en edición facsímil de las obras maestras de caligrafía y pintura de Hermann Zapf. 27
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Biografía 28
Herman Zapf (Biography) Zapf (November 8, 1918 – June 4, 2015) was born in Nuremberg during turbulent times marked by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in Munich and Berlin, the end of World War I, the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the establishment of Bavaria as a free state by Kurt Eisner. In addition, the Spanish flu pandemic took hold in Europe in 1918 and 1919. Two of Zapf’s siblings died of the disease. Famine later struck Germany, and Zapf’s mother was grateful to send him to school in 1925, where he received daily meals in a program organized by Herbert Hoover. In school, Zapf was mainly interested in technical subjects. One of his favorite books was the annual science journal Das neue Universum (“The New Universe”). He and his older brother experimented with electricity, building a crystal radio and an alarm system for his house. Even at this early age, Zapf was already getting involved with type, inventing cipher alphabets to exchange secret messages with his brother. Zapf left school in 1933 with the ambition of pursuing a career in electrical engineering. However, his father had become unemployed and was in trouble with the newly established Third Reich, having been involved with trade unions, and was sent to the Dachau concentration camp for a short time. Under the new political regime, Zapf was not able to attend the Ohm Technical Institute in Nuremberg, and therefore he needed to find an apprenticeship. His teachers, aware of the new political difficulties, noticed Zapf’s skill in drawing and suggested that he become a lithographer. Each company that interviewed him for an apprenticeship would ask him political questions, and every time he was interviewed, he was complimented on his work but was rejected. Ten months later, in 1934, he was interviewed by the last company in the telephone directory, and the company did not ask any political questions. They also complimented Zapf’s work, but did not do lithography and did not need an apprentice lithographer. However, they allowed him to become a retoucher, and Zapf began his four-year apprenticeship in February 1934. In 1935, Zapf attended an exhibition in Nuremberg in honor of the late typographer Rudolf Koch. This exhibition gave him his first interest in lettering. Zapf bought two books there, using them to teach himself calligraphy. He also studied examples of calligraphy in the Nuremberg city library. Soon, 29
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
his master noticed his expertise in calligraphy, and Zapf’s work shifted to retouching lettering and improving his colleagues’ retouching. A few days after finishing his apprenticeship, Zapf left for Frankfurt. He did not bear a journeyman’s certificate and thus would not be able to get a work permit at another company in Nuremberg, as they would not have been able to check on his qualifications. Zapf went to the Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck, a building run by Paul Koch, son of Rudolf Koch. He spent most of his time there working in typography and writing songbooks. Through print historian Gustav Mori, Zapf came into contact with the type foundries D. Stempel, AG, and Linotype GmbH of Frankfurt. In 1938, he designed his first printed typeface for them, Gilgengart, a fraktur. On April 1, 1939, Zapf was conscripted and sent to Pirmasens to help reinforce the Siegfried Line against France. As a consequence of hard labor, he developed heart trouble in a few weeks and was given a desk job, writing camp records and sports certificates in Fraktur. World War II broke out in September, and Zapf’s unit was to be taken into the Wehrmacht. However, because of his heart trouble, Zapf was not transferred to the Wehrmacht but was instead dismissed. On April 1, 1942, he was summoned again for the war effort. Zapf had been chosen for the Luftwaffe, but instead was sent to the artillery in Weimar. He did not perform well, confusing left and right during training and being too cautious and clumsy with his gun. His officers soon brought an unusually early end to his career in the artillery. Zapf was sent back to the office and then to Jüterbog to train as a cartographer. After that, he went to Dijon and then Bordeaux, joining the staff of the First Army. In the cartography unit at Bordeaux, Zapf drew maps of Spain, especially the railway system, which could have been used to transport artillery had Francisco Franco not used narrow-gauge tracks to repair bridges after the Spanish Civil War. Zapf was happy in the cartography unit. His eyesight was so good that he could write letters 1 millimeter in height without using a magnifying glass, and this skill probably prevented him from being commissioned back into the army. After the war had ended, Zapf was held by the French as a prisoner of war at a field hospital in Tübingen. He was treated with respect because of his artwork and, on account of his poor health, was sent home only four weeks Biografía 30
after the end of the war. He went back to Nuremberg, which had suffered great damage in air raids. Zapf taught calligraphy in Nuremberg in 1946. He returned to Frankfurt in 1947, where the type foundry Stempel offered him a position as artistic head of their printshop. They did not ask for qualifications, certificates, or references, but instead only required him to show them his sketchbooks from the war and a calligraphic piece he did in 1944 of Hans von Weber’s “Junggesellentext”. One of Zapf’s projects was the book Feder und Stichel (“Pen and Graver”), printed from metal plates designed by Zapf and cut by the punchcutter August Rosenberger during the war. It was printed at the Stempel printshop.
Pen and Graver, Book, Hermann Zapf, 1947
From 1948 to 1950, Zapf taught calligraphy at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach, giving lettering lessons twice a week to two classes of graphics students. On August 1, 1951 he married Gudrun von Hesse, who taught at the school of Städel in Frankfurt. Most of Zapf’s work as a graphic artist was in book design. He worked for various publishing houses, including Suhrkamp Verlag, Insel Verlag, Büchergilde Gutenberg, Hanser Verlag, Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, and Verlag Philipp von Zabern. 31
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
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El ti pógra g más c C opia do ❢
El tipógrafo más copiado
Rafa Martínez (La Vanguardia)
onocía a la perfección el arte de la caligrafía, requisito indispensable según expertos en la materia como nuestro Josep Maria Pujol (1947-2012), lo que le permitió convertirse en un tipógrafo excelente, además de avanzado: Hermann Zapf fue, efectivamente, el primero en lanzarse a investigar cómo aplicar la tipografía al entonces naciente mundo de la informática. La vida de Hermann Zapf (nacido en 1918 en la ciudad alemana de Nuremberg) resulta fascinante. Es la historia del hombre hecho a sí mismo. Su facilidad para el dibujo lo llevó -una vez descartados los estudios en el instituto técnico debido a los problemas de su padre con el régimen nazi- a entrar de aprendiz en una imprenta. Una exposición de caligrafía de Rudolph Koch en la sala Noris de su ciudad natal y un par de libros -uno de Koch; el otro, de Edward Johnston, creador de la tipografía del metro de Londres- hicieron de él un calígrafo incipiente. Con tal bagaje recaló en el establecimiento tipográfico de Paul Koch, donde conocerá al grabador de punzones August Rosenberg y proseguirá su formación mientras trabaja. En 1938 diseña su primera tipografía, la Gilgengart, para la fundición Stempel, donde en 1947 desempeñará las labores de director artístico, luego de su paso por el ejército durante la guerra como cartógrafo. 33
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Zapf publicó durante toda su vida un buen número de libros y artículos. El primero de ellos, una serie de abecedarios caligráficos que llevaba por título Feder und Stichel, lo preparó con la ayuda de Rosenberg. En unas páginas autobiográficas, Zapf recordaba aquellos días con emoción: “Rosenberg cortaba las planchas durante los bombardeos sobre Frankfurt. ¡Imagínense!”. August Rosenberg desempeña igualmente un papel determinante en la creación de la tipografía Palatino, una mezcla de palo seco como la Futura de Paul Renner y una romana como la Bodoni. Fue su particular homenaje al calígrafo Giambattista Palatino, fruto de un viaje a Italia en 1950.
Página de título y página diseñadas por Zapf para Feder und Stichel El tipógrafo más copiado
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Para Hermann Zapf, el libro era un vehículo imprescindible para dar a conocer su obra y su pensamiento. Su interés por las posibilidades que le ofrecía lo llevó a trabajar como diseñador para editoriales tan importantes como Suhrkamp. A partir de la Palatino, que no era una tipografía para crear textos largos, creó otra que sí lo era: la Aldus. Otros libros escritos por el maestro llevan títulos como Manuale Typographicum (1954), Über Alphabete (1960) o Kreatives Schreiben (1985). Su gran pasión, sin embargo, fue la aplicación de la tipografía en los sistemas informáticos, tarea que desarrolló a partir de la década de los sesenta en Estados Unidos debido al poco interés que despertaron sus propuestas en Alemania.
Página de Manuale Typographicum diseñadas por Hermann Zapf
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Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Dio clases en el Rockwell Institute of Technology de Nueva York de 1977 a 1987, y en los primeros noventa inició una colaboración con David Siegel y Donald Knuth en la Universidad de Stanford. José Luis Martín, director de Campgràfic, editorial especializada en libros de tipografía, nos cuenta que Knuth, “una persona con un profundo sentido estético”, ya había contado con Zapf para resolver la cuestión tipográfica en su obra magna, The Art of Computing. “Llegó a la conclusión de que el arte de la tipografía digital
El tipógrafo más copiado
La superposición entre Book Antiqua y Palatino Linotype es casi perfecta
Microsoft distribuye una tipografía similar- Book Antiqua-, la cual es consideradas por muchos como una imitación. Fue diseñada como una alternativa para registrar los tipos obligada por el Estándar de Adobe PostScript. Comparte los mismos parámetros de la tipografía digitales original, como ancho de carácter, espaciado y las propiedades del “kerning”. La principal diferencia entre las versiones es que la anchura de la C y la S son diferentes.
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consiste en ordenar unos y ceros (tinta y no tinta)”. Sus logros tipográficos están a la vista. Cualquiera que posea un ordenador personal podrá comprobarlo. Tal vez por su carácter pionero -y debido a la complejidad que se adivina en lo concerniente a la preservación de los derechos de autor en este terreno-, la obra de Zapf ha sido, con toda probabilidad, la más copiada. Su lucha contra el pirateo no le sirvió de mucho. Queda, pues, un largo camino por recorrer en este sentido. Zapf estaba casado con la tipógrafa Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. Murió el día 4 de junio (2015) en la ciudad de Darmstadt.
Hermann Zapf junto a su mujer Gudrun Zapf
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Premodernista, Cartel, 1886, desconocido El tipรณgrafo mรกs copiado
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Premodernista, Cartel, 1886, desconocido
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Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Premodernista, Cartel, 1880, desconocido
El tipรณgrafo mรกs copiado
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Premodernista, Portada de libro, 1883, A H Mackmurdo
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Premodernista, Catรกlogo de tipos, 1896, desconocido
El tipรณgrafo mรกs copiado
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Premodernista, Catรกlogo de tipos, 1896, desconocido
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A L egend a ypeM D esigne ❢
A Legendary type designer
aybe you’ve never heard of Hermann Zapf, the legendary type designer and calligrapher who passed away this summer after a long and fruitful career. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t come in contact with his work. Zapf was more famous than many other type designers, whose work is usually known only to graphic artists of various kinds. But Zapf was unique both in the designs he produced and in the longevity of his career. When I was learning typography and design, Zapf’s typefaces were some of the best known and most used in the world, and because of that they influenced me quite profoundly.
Optima, Graceful and Elegant Modernism For instance, the very first long document I ever designed, a literary magazine while I was in college, was set in one of Zapf’s most famous typefaces, Optima, originally issued in 1958. Although Optima was not the most famous or the most widely used of Zapf’s typefaces, I think it has a claim to be the one that will last the longest. It’s an amazing achievement. Zapf was trying to create a design with elements of both sans serif and serif faces. He wanted to create an almost universal design that could be used just as easily for running text as for headlines and other display purposes. From roman fonts that show the traces of the calligrapher’s pen, 45
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Zapf borrowed the gradually thickening and thinning strokes that give letterforms grace and elegance. But Optima is a sans serif typeface, modern and spare in design. When used correctly, it can be forceful, quiet, even monumental. Although I stopped using Optima some time ago, it still plays an important part in printed and other typographic displays. The photo at the top of this post is from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Architect Maya Lin used Optima to carve the names of the soldiers who died in that war on the massive wall that forms the bulk of the monument, and she couldn’t have made a better choice. Palatino, Humanistic Old Style for a New World “Named after 16th century Italian master of calligraphy Giambattista Palatino, Palatino is based on the humanist fonts of the Italian Renaissance, Fuentes 46
which mirror the letters formed by a broad nib pen; this gives a calligraphic grace. But where the Renaissance faces tend to use smaller letters with longer vertical lines with lighter strokes, Palatino has larger proportions, and is considered to be a much easier to read typeface.”—Wikipedia Probably the font that Zapf is best known for is Palatino, and that’s part of what killed this font for many designers. Why? Because it was included in the original 35 Postscript system fonts that formed the basis of the desktop publishing revolution. It was the only oldstyle face and it seemed that every single person who wanted to produce an invitation, a newsletter, an advertisement, an annual report, or anything else believed that Palatino would give their product a touch of “class.” Of course, with all these amateur designers hacking away at the early and still somewhat primitive tools we had, it soon seemed that we 47
Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
were living in a sea of atrocious looking designs created with Palatino. I don’t think that’s true any longer. One of the interesting things about Hermann Zapf’s career is that he started when books were typeset with hot metal type and printed letterpress.
Premodernista, portada de revista 1874, desconocido Fuentes 48
When the industry moved on to “cold type� and photolithography after World War II.
Modernismo tardio, publicidad 1948, Alexander Ross
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Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
And he kept right on working when graphic arts entered the digital era, and was still producing variants of Palatino as late as 2006, almost 60 years after its introduction. More Memorable Typefaces from Hermann Zapf Zapf designed many typefaces over his career, here are three more that have played a big part in my design work over the years. Melior, a serif type designed for newspapers including The Village Voice, which used it for years.
Melior is sturdy and masculine, to my eye. It can create great looking book pages, but also works quite well in corporate materials and other collateral. Fuentes 50
Village Voice cover, 1970s., Art director: George Delmerico.
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Homenaje a Hermann Zapf
Zapf created Zapfino right from his own calligraphy notebooks. It’s a sweeping calligraphic font that ships with every Macintosh computer, so I’m sure you’ve seen it. When used well, and with the many alternate characters available, it can create some dazzling effects.
Zapf Dingbats is a collection of symbols. Like Palatino, it gained incredible popularity because it was built into an Apple laser printer in the 1980s. I’ve got dozens of book files from years ago that include Zapf Dingbats, often for only one character in the book. Like the square bullet, an indispensable bit of graphic elegance. “These symbols were designed by Hermann Zapf in 1978 to complement contemporary typefaces and visually enhance communication. They can be applied to a wide range of documents, from invitations to technical manuals.”—Myfonts.com Fuentes 52
As a designer, I’ve spent many hours with these typefaces, they are the raw materials I use to create books, book covers, and more. And when I’m working on a book layout, I recall that the majority of Zapf’s own design work was as a book designer for many of the publishers of his day, and I see in the page something of his rational and humanistic spirit. I hope learning a little bit about Hermann Zapf will inspire you to try his typefaces, too. To find out more, check the resources.
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Imรกge โ ข
Imรกgenes
Premodernista, Publicidad 1810, J.V. Cissarz
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nes
Premodernista, Publicidad, 1900 George Auriol
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Cubierta de periรณdico, 1966, Seymour Chwast
Imรกgenes 56
Modernismo inicial, Cartel, 1919, Richard Schmidt
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Modernismo inicial, Cartel, 1919, Richard Schmidt
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Portada de revista, 1988, April Greiman
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Publicidad, 1932, Nerino
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Premodernista, Cartel, 1907, Dan Hoecksema
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Premodernista, Portada de libro, 1904, Dard Hunter
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Premodernista, Portada de libro, 1909, Elbert Hubbard
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Premodernista, Portada de catรกlogo, 1908, Kolo Moser
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Modernismo comercial, Portada de libro, 1932, A. Tolmer
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Vanguardia modernista, Pรกgina de prensa, 1932, desconocido
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Modernismo inicial, Pรกgina de prensa, 1917, John Heartfield
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Modernismo inicial, Pรกgina de prensa, 1917, John Heartfield
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Modernismo inicial, Cartel, 1920, O.W. Hadank
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Vanguardia modernista, Portada de prensa, 1931, Solomon Telengater
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Vanguardia modernista, Cartel 1928, Herbert Bayer
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Vanguardia modernista, Periรณdico, 1924, Kurt Schwitters
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Vanguardia modernista, Publicidad, 1927, Sandor Bortnyik
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Modernismo comercial, Pรกginas de libro, 1932, A. Tolmer
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Vanguardia modernista, Publicidad, 1927, Sandor Bortnyik
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Modernismo comercial, Publicidad, 1930, JosĂŠ Iranzo
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Modernismo comercial, Publicidad, 1930, Paul Klein y desconocido
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Modernismo comercial, TĂtulo de valor en bolsa, 1941, desconocido
Modernismo comercial, Tarjetas, 1934, Esteban y Juan Trouchut
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Modernismo comercial, Publicidad, 1930, Paul Klein y desconocido
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Modernismo comercial, Publicidad, 1932, Z.Kmiecik
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Modernismo comercial, Cartel, 1935, BratrĂ Vilimovsky
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Modernismo tardio, Portada, 1952, Walter Allner
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Modernismo tardio, Portada, 1950, Fix-Masseau
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Modernismo comercial, Folleto, 1959, Brownjohn & Geismar
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Modernismo comercial, Portada, 1960, Ivan Chermayeff
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Postmodernismo, Carteles, 1985-90, desconocido
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Postmodernismo, Portada, 1986, Rudy Vander Lans
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Postmodernismo, Cartel, 1989, Katherine McCoy
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Postmodernismo, Portada, 1999, Mary Jane Callister
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Zapf no sólo fue testigo de la evolución tipográfica del siglo XX, sino también un agente de cambio que marcó la transición a la era digital. Pocos han tenido la oportunidad de presenciar la evolución de la tipografía en el siglo XX. Desde los tipos móviles, la fotocomposición, hasta la era digital. Y la lista se reduce aún más al buscar los agentes de cambio que moldearon la manera en que hoy interactuamos con el mundo de las letras y los signos.
CONSEJERÍA DE EDUCACIÓN, JUVENTUD Y DEPORTE
Comunidad de Madrid
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