Lately, I’ve been very busy interviewing and reaching out to small, new type foundries for my niche type design zine (a lot of people have been asking me if this will be published online—I’m not sure yet; it may just be in print). I have a bunch of different methods for finding foundries. At the beginning, I relied upon dozens of Are.na lists to guide me to foundries. When I realized that the newest foundries (launched within the past year) have great perspectives for my zine, I started diving down the rabbit-hole of type foundry indexes (typefoundries.info, Type Foundry Directory, and Type Atlas were most helpful). When those didn’t surface enough for my liking, I turned to Google Search operators to find foundry listings on Fonts In Use that said something along the lines of “launched in [month] 2025.” That gave me some great ones.

While my methods were not the most elegant, my conversations certainly have been. I totally overshot, and reached out to way more type designers than I need to for the zine, but talking to them and hearing their unique perspectives is just… so much fun. It’s forced me to be organized and keep a crazy spreadsheet with dozens of names and statuses and seventeen different colors.

Something that I learned from this part of the process: There are so many type foundries. I’ve probably reached out to everyone who’s even remotely relevant to my zine by now, but it’s incredible to me how many of these small businesses are able to support themselves.

One foundry that I stumbled upon in my research, launched in November, is GD Foundry, the type design practice of Stockholm-based studio Gärde Design. While I’m fascinated by many of their typefaces, GD Optio caught my eye when I was browsing their catalog. Optio is a reimagination of the classic humanist sans-serif Optima, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1958. It’s long been a favorite of mine, always eluding me, “Is that a serif that I see?” I would ask myself. This reimagination preserved that spirit I loved, while modernizing the font. I wanted to learn more: about this version, about the original, and humanist sans-serifs in general.

So I turned again to Fonts In Use, this time carefully examining all typefaces tagged with Optima. I opened them all up in the browser, determined to find all Optima-inspired typefaces from the past few years. I expected to see not more than a couple, spread out by a few years. But no. This process yielded me with four Optima reimaginations… all from 2025. That was when I got confused. Why, in 2025, would there be four typefaces inspired by Optima, but none in the previous few years?

I wanted to find an answer. After all, I had created this whole question in the first place. So I dug up all the information I could find on each of them: Amarelle Sans, Museum, TWK Issey, and, my personal favorite, GD Optio.

This one has the simplest backstory: on typeface from a three-piece set reinterpreting three of Hermann Zapf’s most famous designs: Palatino, Chancery, and Optima—as Serif, Chancery, and Sans, respectively, and meant to go together. Amarelle Sans, the Optima-inspired one, was designed by Alex Blattmann, Ben Jones, and Diogo Rapazote, and released to Dalton Maag’s catalog.

Released by one of my favorite bigger foundries, Pangram Pangram, in March of 2025, and designed by Andrea Biggio, Mat Desjardins, and Francesca Bolognini, Museum finds its inspiration through Optima sketches found on old banknotes. While I think it’s a fantastic typeface, it strays a bit farther from the roots of Optima. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just an interesting thing—one of the many considerations of picking a typeface.

Museum was recently used by Sporthotel Lorünser, an Alps ski hotel, in a rebrand by Teel, paired with Pangram Pangram’s Editorial Old, providing (in my opinion) a really beautiful effect.

Designed by Paris-based Rimasùu Studio, Issey was released by Weltkern in October. According to the description, it is, “Inspired by French vintage fashion show invitations and Japanese aesthetics… [and] rooted in the tradition of incise typefaces such as Optima.” Like Museum, Issey uses Optima as a jumping-off point—not as a limiting anchor. While I do see more of a resemblance to the original than Museum, I still think it takes more of a modern approach to the reinterpretation.

As I mentioned, this one is my favorite. Not only does it come from a small, new, yet highly talented foundry, it has all the qualities one would want from a reimagining of Optima—and the name is spot-on. Optio was created by Marcus Gärde, and Anders Wikström (read Anders’s thoughts on it here), and released by the brand-new GD Foundry in November. It achieves what any of these strive to do: to preserve the legacy of Optima, but to breathe new, digital life into it. Oh, and it comes with one of the best lines in a typeface description I’ve seen, “… because good design should be both functional and flavorful.”

Now that we’ve established our facts, understood the four Optima-inspired typefaces released in 2025, and learned about digging through history to create something all-new, I’ll attempt to answer the question I posed at the beginning: Why is it, that in 2025, there were four typefaces released inspired by Optima?

Optima has a hand-drawn element to it. While even Anders Wikström, the designer of Optio, notes in his post about his font that, “Personally, I don’t think it reaches the lofty standards of Zapf’s calligraphy. But it still has to be said that it originated a new subgenre of sanserifs.” Hand-drawn elements are something we’re missing from our everyday lives, in this era of AI. The type world faces the risk of being eaten by AI, by fonts created from a dataset of other fonts. So what do they turn to? The most calligraphic of fonts, found by digging through history, at fonts created before there was such an notion of fonts created by AI. And these type designers take these historic fonts, and use them, as well as a variety of other sources, to create new fonts.

I see an analogy there. Instead of leaving it up to AI to create new fonts which are really combinations of old ones, the designers take it upon themselves to pay homage to these designers that have inspired them, and create something new—not destroying the soul of the old font, but amplifying it. Some would even say making it better.

With Optima, it was no coincidence that four fonts released in 2025 were inspired by it. Optima is a masterpiece of creativity and the human hand, with flared terminals and a sophisticated texture, literally the opposite of something an AI font creator could make. These designers, in a sea of AI, chose to augment this human creativity, rather than let AI swallow the world.

I’m really excited for 2026 in type design. Not just new font releases, but all the new foundries that will come about (Type Atlas lists 27 foundries launched in 2025), and I’ve already discovered a couple established this year. Most of all, my interest is piqued to see what 2026’s Optima will be—a font cherished by type designers, that leads them to create new versions, inspired by the original.

Will 2026 bring a bunch more Optima redrawings? Maybe. But chances are, there’s something new, waiting just around the corner. After all, the first one that I mentioned from this year was released last March, so let’s just wait and see…!

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