This Apple system font was designed as a bitmap by Susan Kare, and used for menus and buttons throughout the operating system — a large part of the Mac’s cute appeal. (The friendly icons were also designed by Kare.) More recently the Chicago design was made into an scalable TrueType font by the Bigelow and Holmes studio, but at small sizes on screen the new font is identical to Kare’s. More…

For Mac OS 8, Apple decided to discard this wonderful part of their brand’s identity, and commissioned David Berlow of the Font Bureau to design Charcoal.