Not too young here; San Francisco was one of the original bitmapped 'city' fonts which shipped with the original Macintosh operating system, alongside Monaco, Chicago, Geneva, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Athens, Venice, London, and Cairo.
I often wonder if what appears to me to be a very clear cut in aesthetic standards between the 1980s and the 2010s is the result of my own bias (I was born in the late 1990s) or actually a thing. In fact, I do not find the difference between common fonts used in the 1960s -> 1990s as shocking.
What's your take on this? Do you think there has been a bigger and more drastic change in what people consider "aesthetically pleasant" between now and the 1980s compared to other time-periods.
archive.org has a selection of Byte computer magazine issues from the 1980s. I don't think the design is particularly distinguished. It's functional and good enough, but it's not as polished as a generic Bootstrap site.
You have to remember that before the Mac arrived, if you wanted graphic design you had to pay someone. Or if you were ambitious, you'd maybe buy some stick-on letter decals and try to make them line up to make a headline or a logo. (It hardly ever looked good.)
Most people had no idea what fonts were, and if they were aware of graphic design at all it was because of vinyl album covers.
On computers, the previous generation of 8-bit micros couldn't handle fonts. So you had a choice between the system font, which usually looked ugly but might have some weird icons you could draw shapes with, and the kind of overwrought hand-drawn (pixeled?) lettering you'd find in many 8-bit games.
A lot of people underestimate how influential the Mac was. It turned graphic design into something everyone could work with - which is why you now have fast food joints with sandblasted Helvetica on their windows, and regular passing font fads, like Ray Larabie's Neuropol, which was everywhere ten years ago.
1990s/2000s web design was not a little crass, with Flash loading pages everywhere, lots of cyan and orange, fonts that said "Look at me! I'm a font!", and strange linear graphics with 45 degree kinks in them. Business sites were often messy and used a lot of Verdana and Tahoma - like Amazon's product pages, which haven't changed much in ten years.
The recent Bootstrap/etc fad has converged on a style that isn't distracting and works well when you want a clean but pleasing look. It's kind of homogenised, and not very creative, especially when it's paired with a hipster logo. But it does the job, and original creative graphic design is not easy.
Having lived through the 1990s and the early 2000s, I prefer the contemporary Bootstrap/Medium look by a long way.
The Apple ][ had a lot of fonts for the third party hires character generators (and dot matrix printers of course), but they were usually fixed width and what we would now consider very lowres. But I used to love listing out my Basic program in the fancy script font.
In fact Bob Bishop's early "Apple Vision" demo used his own machine language HRCG with the same font as in text mode so it could draw text on the screen (which was an amazing feat at the time).
The zero page COUT character output routine vector set so you could just PRINT characters and they would appear in hires. But when you ^C'ed the program it would print out "BREAK" and the basic prompt on the hires screen, then call the CIN character input routine, which went through DOS and was not revectored to the HRCG, so that DOS would reset the COUT vector to normal text mode output, so none of the subsequent text would go to the hires screen. It was maddenly frustrating that it could write any text onto the hires screen while the program was running, up until you broke the program, and then no more. Later general purpose HRCG's solved that problem and added more fonts, so you could use the computer with hires text in any font. It was slow (especially scrolling) but luxurious and worth it!
I can't remember the name of the HRCG I used, but it might have been Beagle Brothers or something like that. They even had variable width text with FlexType!
And then there was Mike Koss's "The Terminal" with its 3x5 font that could fit 32 lines by 70 characters on the screen! I fucking loved that program, and used it a lot, with my face pressed up against the screen.
There was a brief era when the Mac came out in 1984 when bitmap fonts were the thing. I had a lovely ImageWriter printer that could print them all out.
Emigre was one of the early people to push design in that area. They still have a section on their "low res" fonts:
Actually, while on nostalgia lane, does anyone else remember the font called Boston II? It was a shareware font that was the best ImageWriter bitmap font ever. It was a thing of beauty. I've looked for it occasionally, but I haven't found any web references for it.
The OverbiteFF extension (http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/) will let you use the gopher protocol as well. I actually installed it just so I could browse the floodgap gopher server.
It doesn't feel, to me at least, as much that aesthetic standards have changed in general as much as that they've changed on computers. I'm not certain why, but I'd guess it has to do with various things ranging from screen resolution to font availability to marketing.
On the other hand, the "fun" of fonts like San Francisco ('84) might have partially worn off as computers became more integrated into our lives.
Many currently popular web typefaces have been around for decades. Helvetica, Avenir, Franklin Gothic, Futura, etc.
I recently converted all of the old font suitcase (FFIL) files that I salvaged from Mac OS 1-7 (other than the elusive Taliesin which I have the FFIl for but remains unreadable in FontForge) to working OS X bitmap datafork fonts (.dfont). [0] Missing a few random ones such as Fancy (1993), the Apple Newton font, Espy Sans (1993, Apple eWorld, Apple Newton and iPod Mini font, known as System on the Apple Newton platform), eWorld Tight (1993, Apple eWorld font based on Helvetica Compressed), Simple (1993), Apple Newton font, based on Geneva), and toronto. It seems Grant Hutchinson (splorp) seems to have some old converted Apple fonts from his Newton projects [1] and from Mark Simonson [2], which could be promising of finishing the collection of what I've been referring to as the "Lost Fonts" project. I will be e-mailing them when I get the chance...
This prompted me to dig out my old Macintosh disks (then spend half an hour downloading software that could read them only to find out most of it doesn't work on 64-bit Windows)
I found fewer bitmap fonts than I had thought I had saved. I came across a specimen printout with Espy Sans and Espy Serif (also BeBox) so I had it at one point. But I only found a file for "Espi Sans" that I think was an imitation. I also have the TTF conversion Epsy Sans.
If you would like some help cracking Taliesin I spent most of high school reverse engineering resource forks. Some of what I learned must still be lodged in my brain somewhere.
And yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw this article title was the old funky letter font.
I should be able to help you locate some of the lost fonts, and I’d be interested in learning your conversion technique. Please do get in touch. My contact information is in my profile.
Your parent likely knows what it means; the message is no longer clear but the post it was in reply to originally said "random note". Your parent was simply a suggested correction, which didn't hold up after the correction was made.
Does anyone know the name of the most common small font from Windows XP? For example, when you right click and a context menu appears, or the names of files in explorer.
The Wikipedia article seems to imply that the previous San Francisco font hasn't shipped since System 7, which came out in 1991. I think it has been long enough that there shouldn't be any confusion.
Now even Microsoft feels more playful than Apple, at least that's my impression. Designing beautiful products doesn't have to mean that you're stuck up and can't embrace experimentation every once in a while. I miss the times when Apple used to come up with goofy stuff.
The exception being the Apple Watch, which has lots of playful elements, from the drawing feature, to the heartbeat, to the activity achievement awards and the animated emoji.
Drawing and emoji are just normal expectations of an interactive device with a screen, heartbeat stuff is just proximity of the device to biology, and whatever the fuck activity achievement awards are, if something named that is now considered play, then Huxley scores yet another point.
Indeed. If this were the old Apple the devs would have snuck in an easter egg which changes the watch face to a mouse-like cartoon character that totally isn't a copyright violation, honest.
Not sure if you're serious, but I don't think the fact that Apple is influential enough to be able to get the mouse as a legitimate face makes it not as playful.
Also, if the parent hasn't seen it, Apple Watch's particular brand of animated emoji is rather unusual - I think it's somewhat garish, unusually for Apple, but it's certainly an attempt at... something. Drawing is certainly not a normal expectation for such a tiny screen; measuring heartbeats is one thing, but sharing them is another, and... yeah, I shouldn't bother responding to trollish comments.
Off topic, but do people truly feel Googles current culture is playful? The last couple of years have seen Google aim far more for professional and corporate than play, in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface...