Gudrun Zapf von Hesse designed Diotima for D. Stempel AG. The roman was released in 1951, and the companion italic in 1953.

As with many of her faces, Diotima has a lively, calligraphic quality. The roman is light, with a generally wide lowercase. Characteristic letters are the splayed uppercase M, with no head serifs, and the lowercase g, with its open lower bowl. The italic is only slightly inclined and quite narrow. As Robert Bringhurst points out in The Elements of Typographic Style (see Type Bibliography in the Help view list), “The face is named, aptly, for the earliest woman philosopher on record: Diotima of Mantinea, whose metaphysic of love is recited in Plato’s Symposium by her former student, Socrates.”

Diotima has many uses, but works particularly well for ads, posters, sales literature, and well-leaded text.