It was the typeface Chicago that spelled out “Welcome to Macintosh,” ushering us into a new age of personal computing. But it was also a new age for digital type. Here was a typeface created explicitly for the Macintosh, part of designer Susan Kare’s strategy to customize everything from the characters to the icons — that happy computer, the wristwatch, an actual trashcan — to make it feel more human and less machine.
Most of us couldn’t quite put our finger on what made these letters so different. But the secret was in the spaces between the letters. Chicago was one of the first proportional fonts, which meant that instead of each character straining to fill up pixels in a specified rectangle, the letters were allowed to take up as much or little space as they needed.
For someone grown up using a Commodore 64 (with a fixed 40 character screen width) and a (80 characters per line), seeing proportional fonts was a revelation that I will never forget.
The Chicago font remains one of my favourite fonts ever, and seeing it gives me bittersweet feelings. Incidentally, the Mac doesn’t have the Chicago font installed by default anymore, but you can download it from here.
Edit: I’ve replaced the link to download the Chicago font from this to this as Font Book was giving me an error when importing the font downloaded from the original website.