HISTORY TYPEFACE SOFTWARE
HISTORY TYPEFACE MAC

Since both Chicago and Charcoal were intended for screen interfaces, bold design was a de facto prerequisite.

HISTORY TYPEFACE SOFTWARE

Kare had left Apple in 1986 for Steve Jobs’ new software venture NeXT (which Apple later purchased in 1997), and the company called upon type designer David Berlow for this redesign. In hopes of improving readability for a steadily growing customer base, it replaced Chicago with another sans-serif font: the smoother, more straightforward Charcoal. Vital as Chicago was to Apple’s early branding, its on-screen time was finite. Kare, reflecting on others, says: “I believe that I chose New York, for a Times Roman design, and Geneva for the font inspired by Helvetica.” And Elefont, ultimately, became Chicago, a designation Kare says she landed on because she found visual parallels between the heavily weighted characters and Chicago’s “bold skyline.” Photo: creative commons

“Steve Jobs liked the idea of place names,” Kare says, “but was dismissive of the ones we had chosen and suggested that ‘world-class cities’ would be better.”Ī ransom note-style font became known as San Francisco, and a breezy script, Los Angeles. Photo: CREATIVE COMMONSīut their choices didn’t totally align with Steve Jobs’ vision for his company. She and Andy Hertzfeld, an Apple software engineer, decided to pay tribute to their home city of Philadelphia and named early fonts after stops on its commuter train route, like Ardmore, Merion, Paoli, and Rosemont, where they both attended high school. The graphic designer was building up Apple’s font library with pixel-based type known as bitmap fonts, and she realized she needed to give them names that united them. Photo: creative commonsīut before it was known as Chicago, the typeface was christened “Elefont” - because, Kare says, “it was a heavy typeface, and the pun seemed amusing.” Notably, Chicago's dark strokes and staircase-like outlines served as a typographic premonition of Apple’s future: a highly visible company that would be known for consistently reaching new heights. It also stood apart from the standard monospaced styles of screen-based type, like Courier and Lucida Console.

HISTORY TYPEFACE MAC

She created the characters on a prototype Mac before the first model hit the market in 1984 operating within the constraints of a low-resolution display, Chicago consisted exclusively of vertical, horizontal, and 45-degree elements - it had no round edges. “Chicago was designed specifically for use in menus and title bars,” she says. Kare, then a relatively green graphic designer, sought to create a typeface that would amp up the Mac’s user-friendly aesthetic. But the Macintosh, she adds, was novel in that it “allowed for proportionally spaced type, so fonts on the computer could more closely resemble traditional letterforms.” It was one of the earliest signals that Mac computers were not only for the people, but designed by them, too. “An ‘i’ and an ‘m’ occupied the same horizontal space, unlike typeset or handwritten letters,” Kare says. When Kare joined the Macintosh software group in 1982, computer typefaces were primarily monospaced, meaning each character had the same width. Not only was it inextricably linked with Apple’s brand identity in its early years, but it was also groundbreaking in the world of digital typography. Designed in 1984 by Apple’s in-house graphic designer Susan Kare, the Chicago typeface was intended to boost screen readability. This was a time when people largely viewed computers as jargon-filled robots, and Apple aimed to position them as user-friendly portals to alternate universes. It was the operating system’s first typeface, and its name was Chicago. Perhaps you can envision that thick, jagged, sans-serif typeface, even if you can’t identify it. When you pressed its power button, its home screen would greet you with the message, “Welcome to Macintosh,” the glow of technology embracing you like a familiar friend. Decades before the sleek MacBook Air I write this on even existed, Apple introduced its original Macintosh personal computer, a woefully khaki-colored, boxy desktop machine.

History typeface