Matthew Carter, based closely on Optima Medium. No digital versions have been produced. Optima nova (2002) "Optima nova" is a redesign of the original font family, designed by Hermann Zapf and Linotype GmbH type director Akira Kobayashi. The new family contains seven font weights, adding light, demi, and heavy font weights, but removing extra black weight. Medium weight is readjusted to between medium and bold weights in the old family scale. Glyph sets are expanded to include Adobe CE and Latin Extended characters, with light to bold weight fonts supporting proportional lining figures, old style figures, and small caps. The initial and most common release of Optima, like many sans-serif fonts, has an oblique style instead of an italic: the shapes are merely tilted to the right. In Optima nova, this is replaced by a true italic. (In interviews, Zapf has said that this was his original goal from the beginning, but the need to release Optima quickly forced him to settle for an oblique.) Even in Roman fonts, letters such as Q, a, f are redesigned. The overall bounding boxes were widened in Optima nova. Reviewing it, John Berry wrote that "its 'color' on the page comes much closer to that of the original metal version than any of the earlier photo/digital versions did" but that "ends of the strokes in the letters 'a', 'c', and 's' flare much more dramatically than they ever did in the older Optima — so much so that these letters almost look as though they have serifs...It’s a subtle difference, but it’s disturbing if you’re used to the understated elegance of Optima’s letterforms." Optima nova Condensed A condensed variant which consists of light to bold weights, but no italic fonts. The glyph set does not support proportional lining figures, old style figures, or small caps. Optima nova Titling A titling capitals variant, which contains only capital letters, with restyled letterform. The glyph set is the same as "Optima nova Condensed", but also includes extra ligatures. Berry writes in his review of the "nova" release: "it has softly curved joins and interior angles. Instead of the added crispness of detail that you might expect of a face designed for display use, this one looks more sculptural." In the tradition of hand lettering and lapidary inscription, the titling face shares similarities with the work of Zapf's friend Herb Lubalin, especially the exuberant ligatures (for which