Thus, Geneva, Chicago, New York, and other early Macintosh typefaces were named.Īs we get into the more modern typefaces, the names start to get even more interesting. But then Steve Jobs came by and decided it was fine for the designs to be named after cities, but they needed to be world-class cities. According to an article Kare wrote for, since her group was making so many fonts, they started naming them after train stops in suburban Philadelphia. Susan Kare was an important typeface designer for Apple and in the early 1980s, she designed many fonts for the Macintosh computer. The company thought the new name would play better in a global market.Ĭomputers and the advent of desktop publishing, of course, made typefaces more relevant to the average person because we could choose our fonts! It was released in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk, but by 1960 it had been licensed by another company and given the name Helvetica, which comes from Helvetia, which is the Latin name for Switzerland. Helvetica was another typeface that went through an identity crisis. Twelve-point Courier was the standard typewriter font, so I can’t even imagine how many letters were couriered over the years. Howard “Bud” Kettler thought of Courier as Messenger when he was designing it for IBM in 1955, but he described the change of heart that led him to the name Courier this way: “A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability." According to the site, Zapf updated the Palatino typeface in 1999, adding Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters, and my favorite punctuation mark, the interrobang. Palatino takes its inspiration from Renaissance calligraphy and is named after Giovanni Battista Palatino, an Italian calligrapher who lived in the 16 th century. Palatino was designed in 1948 by a famous typeface artist named Hermann Zapf. If you send me a document in any other font, I change it to 12-point Times New Roman before I read it. Times New Roman was the default font in Microsoft Word when I was in school, and-I hesitate to tell you this because people can get really judgy about fonts-it’s my favorite font. It was created in 1931, and its name makes sense when you realize it was designed for the British newspaper The Times. Times New Roman is the oldest typeface on my list.
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