Zapf Civilité

After working on Engravers Initials 3 and Engravers Initials 2 and noodling around with Piel Script, I’m beginning to have a renewed appreciation for calligraphy. I’ve always admired the skill involved , but I never really tried my hand at it. My type design origins were pretty firmly rooted in reading Vinyl and Face Magazine and buying records with sleeves done by Steven R. Gilmore. Those were my inspirations.

But really poring over those faces mentioned, and studying them and how they would have been constructed has made me delve into the art of calligraphy anew. Went to the library and spent an evening looking at the surprising number of books on the subject they had was very edifying. Some of it I still find a bit twee. To me uncials are just a hallmark of corny leprechauns and St. Patty’s day Irish kitsch.

But some of it is just spectacular. One example in particular, Civilité by the great Hermann Zapf caught my eye. His name will undoubtedly be familiar to almost anyone with a computer as the man responsible for Zapf Dingbats and Zapf Chancery, but also as the designer of such ubiquitous typefaces as Palatino and Optima. And many other fine typefaces. I liked Civilité so much I searched for it online. Turns out it has never been digitized. I did find a crappy jpeg of it. Hhhmmmmmmmhhhh......

After tackling the two Engravers Initials, I figured, heck why not. Since the example I had was merely a 500 pixel or so, 72 dpi jpeg, I didn’t have much detail to go by, but I could do a fair approximation. Some features would likely end up a bit different than Mr. Zapf had intended, but that x is just too creamy to pass up. I’m also doing some type for a Canada Post stamp design and the numerals were calling out to me. I’m sure purists are aghast, but it was a fun few hours of drawing and doing it gives my ever increasing respect for calligraphy a boost. I would totally love to tackle this for real, if I could just get proper drawings to work from.