
Hidden Sheep and Typography Archaeology - sohkamyung
https://medium.com/@bzotto/hidden-sheep-and-mac-typography-archaeology-efce770da76c
======
wanderingstan
The authors criticisms of the kerning in Chicago fail to realize one of its
other amazing achievements.

The original Mac had no color or gray scale; only one bit per pixel. Disabled
items in menus were indicated by a dithered gray, a simple on-off alternating
pattern.

Thus, Chicago had to be designed to be legible _even when every other pixel
was removed_. It really was a 12pt masterpiece.

~~~
taejo
My memory is that when grayed out Chicago was right on the border of
legibility, but I found this image [0] in another HN post, and it's slightly
better than I remembered.

    
    
        [0]: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen_image_filters.jpg

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Doctor_Fegg
Perhaps a coincidence (but a good one) that this article spends a lot of time
on lower-case kerning in the light of Frederick Goudy's famous quote:

"Any­one who would let­ter­space low­er­case would steal sheep"

([https://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html](https://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html))

~~~
godbyk
Letterspacing and kerning are not the same thing (as explained on the page you
linked to).

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Cenk
This seems to be the original blog post:
[http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeeper...](http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeepers/)

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doomlaser
Interesting fact about Chicago — in addition to being the bitmap font in the
original Mac system dialog boxes, and the original iPod display font, it was
also repurposed by Square for the English translations of their famous 1990s
RPGs: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III US, Secret of Evermore, etc

~~~
nerdponx
I have some serious UI nostalgia for that iPod.

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pavlov
The dogcow always deserves a mention:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow)

~~~
jacquesm
The Icon Garden still lives on in the wayback machine:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20010419010721/http://icongarden....](http://web.archive.org/web/20010419010721/http://icongarden.jory.org:80/cgi-
bin/overview.pl?lang=en)

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reuben_scratton
The hidden glyphs were ack'd by the great lady reasonably recently:
[https://twitter.com/SusanKare/status/854071334262853632](https://twitter.com/SusanKare/status/854071334262853632)

~~~
JdeBP
... which was in response to
[http://suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeepers/](http://suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeepers/)
.

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sdevio
I loved the look of this font as a kid. I remember spending hours and hours
trying to recreate this font on the zx spectrum from just magazine pictures
and books as I couldn't afford a mac at the time.

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colanderman
The Apple logo persists to this day in Apple's fonts as U+F8FF (last entry in
the Private Use Area):
[https://www.google.com/search?q=](https://www.google.com/search?q=)

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austinjp
Title is erroneous, it seems. The sheep is hidden in Geneva font. From the
article:

"The 18 point version of Geneva includes all the characters you’d expect, and
then, at position $D9, it has an adorable little sheep, shown at left. Other
sizes of Geneva have different little icons in that location (a rabbit, a
hieroglyph, a Mac icon). If you go down to the 9 point size, the sheep comes
back again but is super tiny!"

There are other easter egg doodles hidden in other locations that aren't
accessible through typing on the keyboard.

Enjoyable read, Susan Kare's Chicago font is rightly iconic.

~~~
sohkamyung
My apologies. Yes, the sheep was in the Geneva font. I didn't realise that
when I put up the title.

~~~
tomhoward
This is precisely why the guidelines [1] include this line: “ _please use the
original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. Don 't editorialize_” :)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

