notes.husk.org/likes images.

Poor, unloved Optima. Most of Hermann Zapf’s output hasn’t aged well. Any glory Palatino might have had is machined into a sorry zirconium, Aldus is an improvement but is lipstick on a pig. Michelangelo is great if it’s 1972 and you’re designing the credits for a BBC series about the ancient world, and I suppose that would be a fun aesthetic to evoke nowadays. Who’s doing that? Shrug.

But Optima, poor Optima. It’s built on a stupid conceit (sans? serif? who can tell!), and its digital renditions are terrible. Fell for it, finally, after blanching for years and years when I saw that Life used it as their body copy through the 1960s. Phototypeset on glossy paper, its brittle edges smudged into a kind of charcoal seriousness. It’s gorgeous, I swear it, go find it.

And seeing it in all its glory I can’t unsee that now, and it’s such a frigid spinster’s whisper on this pretty-good map, an elegant old lady who insinuates devilish things about fucking but who no longer fucks, alas.