Introducing the San Francisco system font

On the other hand, the "fun" of fonts like San Francisco ('84) might have partially worn off as computers became more integrated into our lives.

Many currently popular web typefaces have been around for decades. Helvetica, Avenir, Franklin Gothic, Futura, etc.

Emigre was one of the early people to push design in that area. They still have a section on their "low res" fonts:

http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=101

Through their fonts, and in Emigre magazine, the did spend a lot of time discussing what was aesthetically pleasing.

Then the LaserWriter took over, and postscript fonts became more of the norm.

You have to remember that before the Mac arrived, if you wanted graphic design you had to pay someone. Or if you were ambitious, you'd maybe buy some stick-on letter decals and try to make them line up to make a headline or a logo. (It hardly ever looked good.)

Most people had no idea what fonts were, and if they were aware of graphic design at all it was because of vinyl album covers.

On computers, the previous generation of 8-bit micros couldn't handle fonts. So you had a choice between the system font, which usually looked ugly but might have some weird icons you could draw shapes with, and the kind of overwrought hand-drawn (pixeled?) lettering you'd find in many 8-bit games.

A lot of people underestimate how influential the Mac was. It turned graphic design into something everyone could work with - which is why you now have fast food joints with sandblasted Helvetica on their windows, and regular passing font fads, like Ray Larabie's Neuropol, which was everywhere ten years ago.

1990s/2000s web design was not a little crass, with Flash loading pages everywhere, lots of cyan and orange, fonts that said "Look at me! I'm a font!", and strange linear graphics with 45 degree kinks in them. Business sites were often messy and used a lot of Verdana and Tahoma - like Amazon's product pages, which haven't changed much in ten years.

The recent Bootstrap/etc fad has converged on a style that isn't distracting and works well when you want a clean but pleasing look. It's kind of homogenised, and not very creative, especially when it's paired with a hipster logo. But it does the job, and original creative graphic design is not easy.

Having lived through the 1990s and the early 2000s, I prefer the contemporary Bootstrap/Medium look by a long way.

I found fewer bitmap fonts than I had thought I had saved. I came across a specimen printout with Espy Sans and Espy Serif (also BeBox) so I had it at one point. But I only found a file for "Espi Sans" that I think was an imitation. I also have the TTF conversion Epsy Sans.

If you would like some help cracking Taliesin I spent most of high school reverse engineering resource forks. Some of what I learned must still be lodged in my brain somewhere.

And yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw this article title was the old funky letter font.

Speaking of Mark Simonson, I recently realized that he was the very same as the Mark Simonson behind Atari Classic fonts — http://members.bitstream.net/marksim/atarimac/fonts.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBooks

San Francisco is a UI type family for use in products. Just as Apple has never preferred Lucida Grande or Helvetica for marketing (only using either on the web in the pre-webfont era), this announcement doesn't get set in San Francisco. If Apple has a webfont version of it at all, the only place it would get used is on icloud.com, which is an actual web-based product UI.

All that said, this announcement could do with a bit more of the typeface on display than the paltry two letters seen here.