Last week my beloved iMac stopped working for good. It's been more than a decade of a fantastic relationship, but now I have to accept the fact that it won't be with me anymore... With that in mind, I've collected these vintage Mac icons, most (maybe all) made by the great Susan Kare in the best 80's. Curiously, you will see that many of them have remained until today with very few modifications, but others (that dot matrix printer, those faxes, those floppy disks...) have definitely passed into the History. I remember with particular displeasure the d*** Bomb, which appeared unexpectedly when the computer crashed -too frecuently- and you then lost all the work not saved manually. Freaky old times. My favourite character still being Clarus, the dogcow (at the Z, of course). Hope you like them.
A: Mac-happy / B: Mac-unhappy / C: Mac-working / D: Bin / E: Bomb / F: Watch / G: Save / H: Save-as / I: File-text / J: File-vector / K: File-graphic / L: New / M: New-text / N: New-vector / O: New-graphic / P: New-type / Q: Compress / R: Font-kit / S: Font-stack / T: Alert / U: Prompt / V: AppleLink / W: Fax / X: Fax-to / Y: Command / Z: Dogcow (Clarus).
a: Print / b: Arrow / c: Hand / d: Inbox / e: Inbox-in / f: Inbox-out / g: Mail-drown / h: Mail-wings / i: News-headlines / j: Newspaper / k: Easy-access / l: Quick-access / m: Direct-access / n: Folder / o: Folder-speedy / p: Folder-hierarchy / q: Compress / r: Box / s: Desk-drawer / t: Top-drawer / u: Global / v: Library / w: Personal-archive / x: Threaded / y: Volume / z: Zoom.
0: OK / 1: New-blank-file / 2: Pencil / 3: Eraser / 4: Lasso / 5: (Idem) / 6: Brush / 7: Fill / 8: Spray / 9: Apple-logo.
This is another version of a very popular classic computer (fixing 1 pixel wider than the original)! Much better than the VIC-20's CharGen fonts.
This is a clone of Apple 2b Dot-MatrixThis is the classic, pixel version from the 1970's classic computer! This time, it's from the dot matrix font that was lastly made with small letters from the IIe.
This is a clone of Apple 2a Dot-MatrixCredit to all
This is a clone of Chicago 12This is another version of a very popular classic computer (fixing 1 pixel wider than the original) with scanlines! This font mimics the CRT display.
This is a clone of Apple 2b Dot-MatrixA much updated version of the Chicago font used in early Macintosh computers from the 80's. Changes include: Made numerals tabular, extended language support, and additional symbols.
This is a clone of Chicago 12A recreation of the first San Francisco from 1984, originally called Ransom, by the incomparable Susan Kare.
I noticed that among the various recreations of the original bitmap fonts for the Macintosh, this iconic design was missing, so I decided to fill the gap.
I used an image rather than the font as a reference, and don’t know the intended point size, the spacing could be off, and the number of characters is unfortunately very limited.
An unofficial demake of Monaco Regular at 9 point.
Monaco is only available as a pre-installed font on Apple computers.
This font currently contains the FontStruct Basic Latin character set (ASCII + curly quotes). If it gets 100 downloads, I’ll add OpenType Std (Windows ANSI + Mac OS Roman) characters.
This is a version of a very popular classic computer with scanlines! This font mimics the CRT display.
This is a clone of Apple 2a Dot-MatrixWell, it's been a while because I've run out of fonts I want to convert/build. This one is LeConte from GEOS on the Commodore 64. It is pretty much a clone of Susan Kare's Chicago for the Apple systems, so you can use it as a pixelly Apple font in your works.
Wouldn't have minded redoing this with curves, but decided on going with full retro pixelled corners, as that's my main schtick.
An extra bold version of the Chicago font from early Apple Macintosh computers.
This is a clone of Chicago 12The classic Mac font Chicago but with 1-pixel wide strokes.
This is a clone of Chicago 12An even-more-modernized and expanded version of Geneva 9, one of Apple's system fonts in Macintosh System 1.
Full list of changes:
• Removed extra space after lowercase y
• Redrew & so its height matches that of capital letters
• Re-redrew # symbol (more condensed)
• Alternate glyphs for Greek alphabet ΔΩμ that fit better with text (math symbol versions of all 3 characters are unchanged)
• Added even more Unicode characters
• Checked accuracy of font in emulated MacPaint; added characters (e.g. integrals) that were in original font but not Geneva 9.1
• The accented and unaccented lowercase a's were in fact different in the original font, but I made them both double-story here for consistency
This is a clone of Geneva 9.1It's the fancy cursive font from "resource2.dat" from Cube World. Turns out, its actually the 'Venice' font by Susan Kare & Bill Atkinson from the original classic Macintosh, so I've added all the remaining characters from the original font which the cube world version didn't have.
Cube World is Copyright 2010-2019 Picroma e.K.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS FONT IS NO LONGER BEING WORKED ON. I HAVE A BIGGER FONT TO WORK ON FOR THE TIME BEING.
YOU ARE FREE TO CLONE AND FINISH THIS FONT IF YOU WANT.
Finally done. Phew! It took two days to make this. This is a full collection of 5×7 Dot Matrix characters as seen on many devices, like Texas Instruments calculators. A lot of these are custom. Sources include TI-83, TI-86, TI-89, Casio Monochrome Graphing Calculators, Casio fx-115ES PLUS, and the rest, I created them myself. I included fractions for those themes on Microsoft Office don't have matching "1/3" and other fractions with the "1/4", "1/2", and "3/4". The fullwidth characters are substitutes for the other characters in the regular style, such as the math "x" and "y" from Casio.
Please note that character sets like Arabic and some Math Operators are beyond 5×7 pixels. If you want to know why? Because Arabic is very big and if I put it all in 5×7 pixels, the text will look weird, won't really fit inside, and there would be no point to it. I left it as is. Roman Numerals cannot fit if you were doing the "VIII" character, for example.
Enjoy!
8/28/2019: Font created.
1/7/2020: Added characters in the following form: Fullwidth and Halfwidth are used for making TI-73 Explorer characters, plus actual monospace setting characters. Note that Runic, Tagalog, and Hanunoo are replaced with character variants. The last variation of a character is from Minecraft's font. The fractions are also changed to level the line spacing. The wide "M" is never ever for use on Monospacing.
1/8/2020: More variations are added, extended to replace Buhid. I also added other math symbols and more. To type x̄, press unicode shortcut and type 01b2. To type ȳ, press unicode shortcut and type 01b3. I also added over a hundred, or two hundred, more characters to stock up on the font. Oh and I changed the filters to separate the pixels for a more pixel and retro look. Also fixed the spacing on the "Щ" character.
9/8/2020: Added a bunch of more characters to the font set.
8/25/2023: fixed the license so that the download works now.
Here's a font that'll stir up memories for every amateur graphic designer around during the mid 1980s: The main font from Broderbund's Print Shop application. As typical of my retro-based fonts, with a few exceptions (the curly quotes and inverted question and exclamation marks), this is a straightforward glyph dump taken from the Apple IIgs version (which can be played with on Archive.org here: <https://archive.org/details/a2gs_Print_Shop_1987_Broderbund>).
Carthage Sans LKE is an expanded version of my Carthage Sans font, which in itself is a reimagining of Apple's Espy Sans 12 bitmap font. It aims to cover as much as possible of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek blocks of the Unicode standard (thus the initials -- "Latina, Kirilitsa, Elleniki"). I'm open to expanding it to any of the other scripts Unicode covers, but I have little to no personal experience with most other alphabets; if you'd like to contribute, I'd particularly be interested in Arabic, Devanagari, Katakana, Hiragana, Armenian, and Hangul. (I would like to add Hebrew as well, but it's hard to get the diacritics right in what's essentially a pixel font. We'll see.) The current status as of 10/28/2015 (the date of initial publication):
-Latin: all of Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, and "Even More Latin"; Latin Extended-B is missing some characters that seem to be mostly either phonetic notation or obsolete.
-Greek: All Greek characters supported by FontStruct. If you need some of the ancient dialect characters like Pamphylian digamma, they're now in the GitHub version; polytonic will appear there as well, if anyone asks for it. Basic Coptic support is there, although I tried to fit it into the Espy Sans aesthetic rather than trying to duplicate the Byzantine-Egyptian traditional style.
-Cyrillic: Still a work in progress, but all Slavic languages using Cyrillic characters should be covered. The main holdup is Abkhazian, which is spoken by just over 110,000 people in the world and also has one of the longest alphabets in the world; I have no idea how many of them would be interested in this, so it hasn't been a huge priority. (Besides, the PT family from Russia's Paratype is excellent and far better than I could do with most Cyrillized languages.) I've emphasized support for several languages, the most important being Vietnamese (75 million speakers deserve some support no matter how tedious it is to do so).
I've also added characters for Old Irish, Old Church Slavonic, and Icelandic. There's a number of characters used in pan-African linguistics I am not sure if I need or not; they'll get filled in eventually alongside the Cyrillic, but how fast I have no idea.
Carthage Sans extended version on GitHub: https://github.com/csyde/carthage-fonts
I am deeply indebted to Keith Martin (@thatkeith on Twitter), formerly of the UK MacUser magazine, and his Espy Sans Revived project for a reference for the original letter bitmaps; Carthage is entirely my work but it's hard to find Espy Sans specimens in the wild, and his work is probably the best.
This is a clone of Carthage Sans