Fonts On Macintosh - Fonts of The Original Macintosh

Fonts of The Original Macintosh

With the sole exception of Bill Atkinson's Venice typeface, the fonts included with the original Macintosh were designed by Susan Kare, who also designed most of the Macintosh's original icons.

The Macintosh was an early example of a mainstream computer using fonts featuring characters of different widths, often referred to as proportional fonts. Previously, most computer systems were limited to using monospaced fonts, requiring, for example, i and m to be exactly the same width. Vector-based fonts had yet to make an entrance in the personal computer arena, at least for screen use, so all the original Mac's typefaces were bitmaps. Fonts were available in multiple sizes; those sizes installed on a system would be displayed in the font menu in an outline style.

From System 1 through Mac OS 7.6, the default system fonts for Mac OS were Chicago for menus and window titles and Geneva for Finder icons, and they could not be customized. In Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, the default system font was changed to Charcoal menus and window titles, but it could be customized in Preferences.