Optima Alternatives

Stephen Coles

Last edited June 01, 2014

Overused typefaces can lose their impact, especially in branding, advertising, and package design where originality is important. Here are some less common humanist sans serifs in the style of Optima by Hermann Zapf. Some offer more weights, styles, and lowercase characters for greater versatility than the old standby.

Optima™ was designed by Hermann Zapf and is his most successful typeface. In 1950, Zapf made his first scetches while visiting the Santa Croce church in Florence. He sketched letters from grave plates that had been cut about 1530, and as he had no other paper with him at the time, the sketches were done on two 1000 lire bank notes. These letters from the floor of the church inspired Optima, a... Read More

Albert Boton started the FF Page design during studies for the Yellow Pages of a telephone directory. Later on, he pushed forward on his own, made a sans version and added small caps. He took special care to give the inner curves of certain letters a strong, vigorous character, which you can see here.

From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of... Read More