Optima

Optima is a sans serif typeface. It was designed by Hermann Zapf. Some of the lines are a little wider at the ends, which looks a little like serifs but is not.

Optima was inspired by classical Roman capital letters and the stone-carving of Renaissance period tombstones Zapf saw in Florence, Italy in 1950 on a holiday.

Zapf intended Optima to be a typeface that could be used for both body text and for titles. Zapf used only this typeface in his book About Alphabets.

The first release of Optima is the one used the most. Like many sans serif fonts, it has an oblique style instead of an italic.An oblique style has the letter forms slanting, whereas a true italic is a completely different style from the normal medium typeface. In Optima nova, a later release, this is replaced by a true italic. 

References

Category:Fonts
Category:Latin-script typefaces