Why Apple, Google, and other big tech companies create their own fonts

After its famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial, Apple officially unveiled the Macintosh 128k, the "the computer for the rest of us." The Mac revolutionized personal computing. And it was Apple designer Susan Kare’s job to create digital fonts and icons to usher in this new age. 

"I was a typical customer that they were trying to attract, someone for whom the graphical side of it would have been attractive," Kare told a technology historian in 2000. "I didn’t really have much computer experience, but even then I found the rudimentary Mac more appealing to me than the Apple II."

Compared to most personal computers at the time — which used command line interfaces that were too technical for many users to understand— the Mac adopted a much more user-friendly graphical interface (GUI). It featured plenty of things that even the most novice computer user today understands intuitively — pointers, menus, scroll bars, windows, icons, and typefaces. Read more...