![itc zapf chancery italic itc zapf chancery italic](http://legionfonts.com/img-fonts/itc-zapf-chancery-lt-italic/itc-zapf-chancery-lt-italic-font.jpg)
Optima, Zapf's personal favourite font, was selected for the engraved names on the Vietnam War Memorial.įrom his first typeface designed when he was just 20 years old (Gilgengart), through more than 200 others right up to the present day, Zapf's work has achieved an unmatched popular success, while maintaining an aesthetic level which has earned him praise from professionals throughout the world. In 1977 he was made Professor of Typographic Computer Programming at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and his fonts Palatino, Optima, Zapf Chancery, and Zapf Dingbats are now familiar designs found on all personal computers. After the war Zapf worked at the Stempel AG typefoundry as artistic director. However, his work was interrupted by the second world war and he worked as a cartographer in the German military. During this period he gained experience of working with handpress type and producing lettering for musical notation. After this apprenticeship he worked with Paul Koch in Frankfurt. He joined the Karl Ulrich and Company printing firm, as an apprentice, in 1934. Zapf lost two of his siblings to the epidemic. In addition to the political unrest, there was an epidemic of Spanish flu which is estimated to have killed some 20 million people. On the same day a worker's and soldiers' council took political control of the city, Munich and Berlin were in revolution, and the following day Kaiser Wilhelm fled to Holland. Hermann Zapf was born into a turbulent time in 1918 in Nuremberg, Germany.