Optima: The Five Kingdoms of Life

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Type Specimen Book

The design problem for this project was to create a type specimen book for the typeface Optima. Overall, this type specimen book was intended to showcase the Optima typeface family and its different uses within text.

Due to Optima’s graceful appearance, it is occasionally described as the font of information and science. With this, and due to it having only five typefaces within the family, I chose to highlight the font through the five kingdoms of life in biology. Optima Regular was used for the Kingdom Monera, Optima Italic was used for the Kingdom Protista, Optima Bold was used for the Kingdom Fungi, Optima Bold Italic was used for the Kingdom Plantae, and Optima UltraBlack was used for the Kingdom Animalia. Each typeface within the Optima family was accompanied by three images that represented the kingdom they were paired with. Each image had a letter interwoven into its contents and labeled a different anatomical aspect of type. Alongside this, each typeface within the Optima family was showcased through the alphabet, numbers, and special characters along with poems by Pattiann Rogers.