UX Planet Follow. Written by Jon Robinson Follow. More From Medium. Designing for multiple screen densities on Android. Hybrid Exhibit Environments. Tate Johnson. Craftsmanship a1. Mohammad Wasim. Sixuan Li. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. Just like a Gutenberg of his era, Steve Jobs offered us a variety of typefaces to digitally write our thoughts and memories with clarity, honesty and elegance. All of those characteristics were vital to any product Jobs gave his blessing to, in one of his famous turtlenecks, in front of a projector screen that showed the future he, himself had designed for the world.
Typography was the raw material for Jobs to create good, user friendly design, therefore he decided to invest in it. He was aware — in contrast with other leaders of the digital era — that typefaces are the necessary building materials , not just to create sentences, but to structure the digital communications frame with the human element, making it unique.
Jobs was surprised the same way any computer user was surprised when his first Mac was shipped to him with something amazingly different, amazingly simple. A wide choice of fonts in a range of styles and sizes. He created the ideal communication circumstances and he commissioned designer Susan Kare to create new bitmap type designs named after his dream cities.
He was ready to conquer the world and he had no reason to be secretive about it. Figure 2. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. At the time, the student dropout believed that little he had learned would find a practical application in his life. But things changed. Ten years after college Jobs designed his first Mac, and it came with something unprecedented -- a wide choice of fonts. Originally he hoped to do this on the cheap, and by enlisting the designer Susan Kare he created new bitmap designs that were available in a range of styles and sizes.
The original thought was to name them after stops on a local Philadelphia train route close to where Kare had grown up, but Jobs then plumped for the more accessible notion of cities he loved: London, Chicago, Geneva, Toronto, Venice, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
These names had the added advantage of reflecting the typographical character of the cities in question, so London had an old-fashioned serif "blackletter" feel that Dickens might have favored, Venice had an artisanal script feel, and Geneva had a cleaner Swiss sans-serif look.
For some reason yet to be fully justified, the San Francisco font appeared to be made up of odd letters torn from a newspaper, a digital ransom note. Two years later, he returned to visit and consult Palladino to the enthusiasm of current students. He was a dynamic person even when he was young. The unique thing he brought to it was the democratization of digital type.
Phinney explains Jobs brought font menus to the masses, introducing not just experts but average consumers to individually designed lettering. Phinney relates his work with digital design and computing to the of the Gutenberg printing press. He drove an awareness of design including typography in particular.
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