I wonder how many HN readers are too young to remember the original San Francisco font on the original Mac. It was the "ransom note" font.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface...
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=World_Class_Citie...
I often wonder if what appears to me to be a very clear cut in aesthetic standards between the 1980s and the 2010s is the result of my own bias (I was born in the late 1990s) or actually a thing. In fact, I do not find the difference between common fonts used in the 1960s -> 1990s as shocking.
What's your take on this? Do you think there has been a bigger and more drastic change in what people consider "aesthetically pleasant" between now and the 1980s compared to other time-periods.
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.
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Fonts/%20bitmapped%20fonts/screen-ImageWriter%20Fonts/Boston%20II
Hopefully that's what you're looking for :)
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.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=pD0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7...
In fact Bob Bishop's early "Apple Vision" demo used his own machine language HRCG with the same font as in text mode so it could draw text on the screen (which was an amazing feat at the time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-cyU
The zero page COUT character output routine vector set so you could just PRINT characters and they would appear in hires. But when you ^C'ed the program it would print out "BREAK" and the basic prompt on the hires screen, then call the CIN character input routine, which went through DOS and was not revectored to the HRCG, so that DOS would reset the COUT vector to normal text mode output, so none of the subsequent text would go to the hires screen. It was maddenly frustrating that it could write any text onto the hires screen while the program was running, up until you broke the program, and then no more. Later general purpose HRCG's solved that problem and added more fonts, so you could use the computer with hires text in any font. It was slow (especially scrolling) but luxurious and worth it!
http://apple2history.org/spotlight/bobbishop/
I can't remember the name of the HRCG I used, but it might have been Beagle Brothers or something like that. They even had variable width text with FlexType!
http://beagle.applearchives.com/Posters/Poster%204.pdf
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/graphics/flextype.txt
And then there was Mike Koss's "The Terminal" with its 3x5 font that could fit 32 lines by 70 characters on the screen! I fucking loved that program, and used it a lot, with my face pressed up against the screen.
http://mckoss.com/jscript/tinyalice.htm
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/apple2/the.terminal.doc.t...
[0] http://i.imgur.com/Q1tZknV.png
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/splorp/8289012748/in/photostre...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20030807223056/http://www.ms-stud...
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
Yeah, sure. For the time being, they will be here: http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/LostFonts/ As previously stated, I'm still missing a few though.
>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
Oh wow, nice find! I never made that connection.
Also, if the parent hasn't seen it, Apple Watch's particular brand of animated emoji is rather unusual - I think it's somewhat garish, unusually for Apple, but it's certainly an attempt at... something. Drawing is certainly not a normal expectation for such a tiny screen; measuring heartbeats is one thing, but sharing them is another, and... yeah, I shouldn't bother responding to trollish comments.