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• June 9, 2015

Hermann Zapf in an undated photograph.

Hermann Zapf, whose calling in life — “to create beautiful letters,” as one of his students put it — found expression in lush, steady-handed calligraphy and in subtly inventive typefaces that have brought words to readers on paper, on signposts, on monuments and on computer screens for more than half a century, died on Thursday at his home in Darmstadt, Germany. He was 96.

Jerry Kelly, a leading American typographer, calligrapher and type designer who was a friend and former student of Mr. Zapf, confirmed the death.

In the world of type design — an exacting, arcane craft that is underappreciated for its impact on how people communicate and receive communication — Mr. Zapf (pronounced DZAHFF) was a giant. Prolific and versatile, he created around 200 typefaces in numerous alphabets, including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and Cherokee, spanning the eras of metal typesetting, phototypesetting and digital typesetting. His typefaces include:

¶ Palatino, his breakthrough font, a much-copied classical Roman design adapted for the 20th century. It is available on Microsoft Word and from Linotype and other sources and is being used by Abercrombie & Fitch for its corporate logo.

¶ Optima, a revolutionary font that melded the thick and thin strokes of a traditional typeface within a sans serif design. Its capital letters are used for the names inscribed on the Maya Lin-designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and its bold version was used for John McCain’s presidential campaign posters and buttons and continues to be used by the Estée Lauder cosmetics company on its packaging.

¶ Melior, a serif type designed for newspapers including The Village Voice, which used it for years.

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The Sept. 11 memorial in New York uses the typeface Optima, designed by Mr. Zapf.Credit...Michael Arad

¶ Hunt Roman, a sturdy serif designed for use by a botanical library.

¶ Zapfino, a sweeping calligraphic font that ships with every Macintosh computer.

¶ Zapf Dingbats, a collection of symbols that achieved wide popularity when it was built into an Apple laser printer in the 1980s.

It may be difficult to explain the type designer’s art to the unschooled, but in interviews other type designers had no trouble assessing Mr. Zapf’s stature.

“Last Thursday, all the rest of us moved up one,” said Matthew Carter, whose designs for web fonts, including Verdana and Georgia, earned a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award, in 2010. “That’s my way of saying Hermann was on top.”

Mr. Kelly said: “What Michelangelo was to sculpture and Beethoven was to music, that’s what Hermann Zapf is to type design and calligraphy. We’re all followers of his now.”

The type designer works letter by letter but also with a concept of the whole; the art resides in a multifaceted aesthetic that considers the shapes of letters (does the capital G, for example, have a horizontal ledge?); modulations in the thickness of a letter’s lines (an o with its sides wider than its top and bottom curves); and the relationship of the letters to one another (should the vertical line of a lowercase b or d rise as high as a capital letter?).

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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington also uses Optima.Credit...Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

Working with these elements, Mr. Zapf evoked beauty as well as clarity, cleverness without hubris, invention without distraction. A master calligrapher who could reproduce a typeface by hand, he brought an admiration of the art of the pen to the art of the font. And conscious of history, he felt that type should both acknowledge tradition and reflect modernity.

“Zapf was someone who could write 10-point type” — letters less than 1/6 of an inch high — “and it looked like a typeface,” said Steve Matteson, who designed Droid Serif and other fonts for cellphone screens as well as Open Sans for Google pages and ads. “It was pretty astounding; his muscle control was so fluid.”

Mr. Carter said that Mr. Zapf’s genius lay in his solutions to the central problem that type designers, like industrial designers, face: expressing creativity while being circumscribed by practicality.

“Type design is constrained by the alphabet,” he said. “The designs have to be read, so we cannot change the nature of the alphabet beyond a certain amount without losing the readers. Zapf’s ability to find originality in his faces while not going outside the acceptable canon of legibility is really a triumph.”

Mr. Zapf was born in Nuremberg, Germany, on Nov. 8, 1918, just as World War I was ending, as the revolution that established the Weimar Republic was beginning and as the flu pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide — including two of Mr. Zapf’s siblings — was gaining momentum. His father was an autoworker and a union organizer who ran afoul of the rising Nazi Party and was briefly sent to prison in the 1930s.

Young Hermann began an apprenticeship as a photo retoucher in 1934, and it was around that time that he became interested in the work of the typographer and calligrapher Rudolf Koch. Still a teenager, he taught himself calligraphy from books.

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From top to bottom, Mr. Zapf’s typefaces Palatino, Zapf Dingbats and Zapfino.

Mr. Zapf designed his first printed type — called Gilgengart, it was ornately calligraphic — for D. Stempel AG, a Frankfurt foundry. He was a soldier in the German army during World War II, stationed mostly in Bordeaux, France, and serving as a mapmaker. After the war he went back to work for Stempel.

He first drew Palatino in 1948, then modified it on the advice of American typographers he had befriended in the early 1950s, Mr. Carter said. Over the years Mr. Zapf taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford and elsewhere, and created typefaces for the Hallmark greeting card company, which produced a short film about him.

“His first design was very Germanic,” Mr. Carter said. “The reaction people here would have had — ‘What is this W?’ That doesn’t look like a W’ — this wasn’t going to fly in the English-speaking world, so he made changes, which I think was very shrewd. He was lionized here.”

Mr. Zapf began designing typefaces for phototypesetting, the first computer-aided form of typesetting. His Marconi font was the first designed specifically for digital composition.

Mr. Zapf also earned prominence designing books and postage stamps. In 2000, a retrospective of his work at the Grolier Club in New York led the art critic Roberta Smith to write in The New York Times, “It doesn’t take long to realize that his career demonstrates the combination of natural (probably prodigious) talent, early achievement and continued growth and innovation that we demand of major artists.”

Mr. Zapf is survived by his wife, the former Gudrun von Hesse, who is also a renowned calligrapher and type designer and whom he married in 1951, and three granddaughters. His son, Christian, died in 2012.

“The passion for him was to create beautiful letters,” Mr. Kelly said. “But at the same time, he was like the Beatles. His typefaces are so popular — go anywhere in the world, pick up a magazine in any airport, you’ll see Hermann Zapf typefaces — but they’re also so good that the connoisseurs all know it. And that happens maybe every 100 years.”

A correction was made on

June 10, 2015

An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary misspelled the name of one of the typefaces Mr. Zapf designed. As the obituary correctly notes, it is Palatino, not Patatino.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Hermann Zapf, 96, Dies; Designer Whose Letters Are Found Everywhere. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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