Chicago

Drawn pixel by pixel on graph paper for a 512×342 black-and-white screen, where every letter had to be legible in a nine-pixel height with no anti-aliasing. Kare designed most of the original Macintosh interface including the icons. Apple brought Chicago back for the iPod in 2001, which made a bitmap face from 1984 the typeface of the twenty-first century's most successful music player.

The facts

Designed by

Susan Kare

Released

1984

Classification

Sans-serif

What it signals now

The original Macintosh, and the first iPod.

Where you have seen it

• Every Macintosh menu bar from 1984 to 1997
• The first three generations of iPod

Other typefaces from the 1980s

This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.