San Francisco is both a modern font used by Apple and a long-gone font from early Macs designed to look like a ransom note. Typography fans will undoubtedly spot ones I missed, or know different fonts with the same name. There isn’t.) I finally found the limit to how many fonts I could use in one place.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “Did I check to see if there’s a Boise font?” (I did. What started as a quirky challenge to make a US font map during COVID-19 quarantine days started to edge into obsessive-compulsive territory. That’s not actually the answer, it’s just where I had to stop, because the more I looked the more I found. Just how many fonts are named for American places? The US Font Map, featuring 222 typefaces named for American places. The friendly curves of Chicago no longer grace my font menu, but as the number of fonts online has grown and grown, it started to seem everywhere in America had its own typeface. Of course, typography didn’t start with the Mac, and it has hardly stood still since 1984. I made newsletters for my classes, typed and printed my reports wondering if I was even allowed to, and, without fail, used as many fonts per page as I could squeeze in. Words weren’t just words, they could be design, history, geography. Otherwise, I had MacPaint and MacWrite where I could draw and type whatever I could think of, and there was a menu of fonts to choose from - not just Chicago, but a list of fonts named for world cities. I got a text adventure game version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because a clerk at Egghead Software dropped a shelf on my mom’s head and gave it to her as a “please don’t sue us” gift. There wasn’t much to do on it right away.

Both the smily Mac and the Chicago font that greeted anyone booting up a Mac in the mid ’80s were designed by Susan Kare, and they both captured the friendly, accessible new era of computing that made the Mac so revolutionary. Before 1984, I had never encountered the word “font.” Then a Macintosh computer showed up in my house.Ī beige block with a too-small black and white screen and a thingy called a “mouse,” the first thing I saw when I turned it on was “Welcome to Macintosh” in what I would soon learn was a font called Chicago.

Welcome to las vegas sign font