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How Steve Jobs Changed the World with Fonts

October 6th, 2011

UI Design

The world is mourning the passing of a great innovator. Steve Jobs became an icon because of all the ridiculous game-changers Apple has brought us. With such a list of revolutionary products being delivered by one company, it’s easy to overlook subtle, cultural changes that have permeated our subconscious as a result of these enormous inventions.

Quick: name your favorite font. We all have one (or maybe you have a few.) We owe our cultural font awareness to Steve Jobs.  The first Mac, the Macintosh 128K, was released January 24, 1984, and came with an 8 mhz processor, a keyboard, a mouse, a GUI and 12 bitmapped fonts: Athens, Cairo, Chicago, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, Taliesin, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Venice. Notice a pattern? All these fonts were named after world-class cities: Steve’s idea.

With the exception of “Venice” all the fonts on the Macintosh were designed by Susan Kare. Susan also designed all the icons for the original Macintosh. (I could devote a blog to icons alone.) Susan was enlisted as Apple’s font designer in an effort to load the Macintosh with cheap fonts. Rather than pay for expensive licensing of well-known printer fonts, they could be created in-house much more economically.

In the early days of the GUI fonts were all bit mapped, meaning that if they were scaled too large they would produce blocky, jagged edges. Apple revolutionized font rendering with TrueType fonts which opened an entirely new frontier to font designers and end users alike. There were four initial TrueType fonts: Times Roman, Helvetica, Courier, and Pi font. Of course you had to either send anything you produced with these early Truetype fonts out for professional Heidelberg press output or, if you had the means, you could print them yourself on your $6,995 Apple LaserWriter.

But I digress.  Sure, it’s fun to wax-nostalgic about the early days of desktop microprocessing and the horrible times we all had trying to establish solid SCSI-chain connections, compressing your design masterpieces on multiple Zip disks, only to schlep across town and find out the printer doesn’t have the same version of the font you used. Printing fonts superseded the use of fonts on the web. Today we are all type-heroes. PostScript combined with cross-browser support of the @font-face rule has opened up doors providing designers and developers alike with endless choices of fonts for print and the web.

These enormous innovations in type may seem like small footnotes in Jobs’ long list of innovations, but there is a direct lineage from Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs. Steve understood the importance of maintaining complete control over the written word. Steve’s truest legacy is that of an icon who allowed the common man to communicate more broadly than ever before.

This blog was authored with the help of NavArts’ interactive developer, Matt Heiner, a fellow Jobs aficionado for life.