Typography of Apple Inc.

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This article, Typography of Apple Inc., covers Apple Inc.’s use of typefaces in marketing, operating systems, and industrial design. Apple has used three corporate fonts throughout its history including Motter Tektura, Apple Garamond and Adobe Myriad.

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[edit] Corporate fonts and brand identity

For at least 18 years, Apple's corporate font was a custom variant of the ITC Garamond typeface, called Apple Garamond. It was used alongside the Apple logo, for product names on computers, in countless ads, printed materials and on the company website. Since 2001, Apple has gradually shifted towards using Myriad in its marketing.

[edit] Motter Tektura

Prior to the first Macintosh, Apple used a typeface called Motter Tektura alongside the Apple logo. Motter Tektura was designed by Othmar Motter of Vorarlberger Graphik in 1975 and distributed by Letraset. At the time, the typeface was considered new and modern. One modification to the typeface was that the dot over the i was removed. The lowercase "s" was also modified for the label on the Disk II 5.25" floppy disk drive.

According to the logo designer, Rob Janoff, the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, in line with Apple's mission statement of making high technology accessible to anyone. Janoff designed the logo in 1976 while working with Palo Alto marketer Regis McKenna. The apple's "bite" was originally designed to fit snugly with the Motter Tektura "a."

In the early 1980s, the logo was simplified by removing computer ınc. from the logo. Motter Tektura was also used for the Apple II logo. This typeface has sometimes been mislabeled as Cupertino, a similar bitmap font, probably created to mimic Motter Tektura.

[edit] Apple Garamond

Upon the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple adopted a new corporate font called Apple Garamond. It was a narrow variation of the classic Garamond typeface. Specifically, ITC Garamond (created by Tony Stan in 1977) was condensed to 80% of its normal width. Presumably, Apple felt that the existing ITC Garamond Condensed, at 64%, was too narrow. Bitstream condensed the font and subtly adjusted the stroke widths and performed the hinting required to create a PostScript font which was then delivered to Apple as "apgaram."

Apple Garamond was used in most of Apple's marketing.
Apple Garamond was used in most of Apple's marketing.

In cases when the Apple logo was accompanied by text, it was always set in Apple Garamond. Aside from the company name, most of Apple's advertising and marketing slogans such as "Think different." used the font as well.

This typeface was virtually synonymous with Apple for almost two decades and formed a large part of Apple's excellent brand recognition. It was not only used in conjunction with the logo, but also in manuals, ads and to label products with model names. Even today the association continues; falsified images of rumored new Apple products and spoof advertisements often use it despite the fact that it is no longer current.

Apple has kept the true Apple Garamond font to themselves, but briefly sold ITC Garamond Narrow—Apple Garamond without the custom hinting—as part of the "Apple Font Pack" in the 1990s. A version of the font was also included, hidden away under a different name, in some versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.3, since it was used by the Setup Assistant installation program. See List of fonts in Mac OS X for more information on how the font can be extracted.

Many typographers consider ITC Garamond in general, and Apple Garamond in particular, to be poorly designed typefaces.[citation needed] ITC Garamond is frequently called a "pastiche" or a "Garamond in name only" that has little to do with the 16th-century typefaces that supposedly inspired it. Another common view is that the algorithmic scaling distorted the typeface. Apple changed the name of their licensed version of the typeface when they had the format of the fonts converted to TrueType for their internal use.

[edit] Myriad

Adobe's Myriad is the typeface which is used in Apple's modern marketing.
Adobe's Myriad is the typeface which is used in Apple's modern marketing.

In 2002, Apple gradually started using a variant of the Adobe Myriad font family in its marketing and packaging. As new revisions of its products were released, the text changed from the serif Apple Garamond to the sans-serif Myriad Set (a variant of the former "Myriad Apple" which contains extra ligature). The family's bolds are used for headlines, and other weights are also used accordingly. The Myriad font family was designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe. Adobe's most recent version of Myriad is "Myriad Pro," which has some additional enhancements and character set extensions, but is not significantly changed in design. Myriad Apple, a modification produced by Galápagos Design Group, incorporates minor spacing and weight differences from the standard varieties, and includes Apple-specific characters such as the company logo. While Adobe Myriad is used the most, for titles and eye-catching slogans, some text is set in Helvetica Neue.

Although originally promoted as Myriad, the newest iPod and iPod nano feature a bitmap font known as Podium Sans which is missing Myriad's trademark features such as the splayed 'M' and distinctive 'y'.

[edit] Other fonts used in Apple's marketing

Apple's first logo, drawn by Ronald Wayne.
Apple's first logo, drawn by Ronald Wayne.

Prior to adopting the bitten Apple as its logo, Apple used a complex logo featuring Isaac Newton sitting below an apple tree. The words APPLE COMPUTER CO. were drawn on a ribbon banner ornamenting the picture frame. The frame itself held a quotation from Wordsworth: "Newton...A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought...Alone." The logo was hand drawn and thus did not use an established font. However, the type is similar to Caslon with some idiosyncratic details, such as an R deviating from the general style.

In the marketing of the Newton PDA, Apple chose to experiment with Gill Sans instead of the regular Apple Garamond. Gill Sans Regular was used in the logo, for the model name on the computer, the keyboard and in advertisement materials, though it was not used as a screen font (except for as part of the Newton logo). Gill Sans was originally designed by Eric Gill around 1927–29 for the Monotype Corporation.

[edit] Keyboards

Univers was first used as the keyboard font of the Apple IIc.
Univers was first used as the keyboard font of the Apple IIc.

Since the Apple IIc in 1984, Apple's keyboards have been using Univers Condensed Oblique on the keycaps. The front-panel buttons on the Apple IIc were tilted at an angle corresponding to the inclination of the keyboard letters. Apple's partner in industrial design, Frog Design, was responsible for the choice of this typeface.

Six keys from a pre-2003 PowerBook G4
Six keys from a pre-2003 PowerBook G4

The keyboard font used on all iBook models and 2003 and later PowerBooks is VAG Rounded, a variation on Helvetica Rounded and Futura. VAG stands for Volkswagen Aktien Gesellschaft, and the font was developed by Sedley Place Ltd. for German car manufacturer Volkswagen and is used in much of their marketing materials. Volkswagen's modification of a classical typeface is similar to Apple's modification of Garamond to create a corporate typeface that is both universal and proprietary.

[edit] Fonts used in other products

Apple's earliest computers had extremely limited graphics capabilities and could originally only display uppercase ASCII using a set bitmap font. The IIc and Enhanced Apple IIe supported 80 columns of text and an extended character set called MouseText. It was used to simulate simple graphical user interfaces, similar to the use of ANSI X3.64. The Apple IIGS system software and Finder used a monospaced 8 pt bitmap font called Shaston 8 as the system font (menus, window titles and so on). Shaston was described in Apple IIGS technote #41 as "a modified Helvetica", but the similarities are not striking. The fonts of the original Macintosh were also available for the GS.

The Newton GUI, using Espy Sans for the small type and Casual for the large.
The Newton GUI, using Espy Sans for the small type and Casual for the large.

In 1993, Apple's Human Interface Group designed the typeface Espy Sans specifically for on-screen use. It was first used for the Newton OS GUI and later integrated into Apple's ill-fated eWorld online service. The Newton used the font Apple Casual to display text entered using the Rosetta handwriting recognition engine in the Newton. The same font found its way into the Rosetta-derived writing recognition in Mac OS X; Inkwell. The TrueType font can be made available to any application by copying the font file which is embedded in a system component to any font folder. (See List of fonts in Mac OS X for more information.) The Newton logo featured the Gill Sans typeface, which was also used for the Newton keyboard.

Apple's eWorld also used the larger bold condensed bitmap font eWorld Tight for headlines. The metrics of eWorld Tight were based on Helvetica Ultra Compressed.

When released in 2001, Apple's iPod music player reused the bitmap Chicago font from the original Macintosh GUI. Later versions of the iPod drew from the larger character repertoire of the TrueType Chicago, adding a number of characters not present in the bitmap Chicago, such as Greek and Cyrillic. Even though the screen supports grayscale, the characters were not anti-aliased.

The iPod mini, with a slightly smaller screen than the iPod, uses the typeface originally designed for the Newton, Espy Sans. In the fourth-generation color iPod (formerly iPod Photo), Podium Sans has displaced Chicago as the user interface font, in part due to the higher resolution of the new color screen.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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