History of Fonts - More than Just a Steve Jobs Idea

We all watched Steve Job's Stanford commencement speech, and he talked about how if he had never taken that calligraphy class, he might never have introduced multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts to the Macintosh. 

Little does he say about the other people who helped make that possible.

Susan Kare is credited with designing the first proportional fonts you could see on screen. 

 

 

 These fonts have since been updated and made in a higher resolution for today's use

Monaco	New York
Geneva	Chicago

The other two were never made into a TrueType font, and have since been rendered obsolete.

Charles M. Geschke & John E. Warnock are the people who created PostScript language. It "was the first printing software that enabled users to print pages that included text, line art and digitized photos."

 This put their company Adobe on the map. PostScript became the industry standard in printing and then Illustrator and Photoshop were born. 

*side note* The font Warnock Pro was named after John Warnock

 Steve Jobs then created TrueType with Apple. This allowed the fonts to be scalable and smoothly rendered. This began the WYSIWYG system, what you created on the screen was what you saw when you printed. "Many key elements of modern typography were brought to the mainstream by Jobs. Being able to see what fonts look like on screen. Showing proportional fonts on screen. Scaling the same font outlines for screen as for print. Putting a “font” menu in applications, and having all applications share a pool of fonts installed at the system level (instead of associated with some specific printer)."

*A little something extra* Benny Wongso designed a Type Book on Geneva