The authors criticisms of the kerning in Chicago fail to realize one of its other amazing achievements.

The original Mac had no color or gray scale; only one bit per pixel. Disabled items in menus were indicated by a dithered gray, a simple on-off alternating pattern.

Thus, Chicago had to be designed to be legible even when every other pixel was removed. It really was a 12pt masterpiece.

My memory is that when grayed out Chicago was right on the border of legibility, but I found this image [0] in another HN post, and it's slightly better than I remembered.

    [0]: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen_image_filters.jpg

Perhaps a coincidence (but a good one) that this article spends a lot of time on lower-case kerning in the light of Frederick Goudy's famous quote:

"Any­one who would let­ter­space low­er­case would steal sheep"

(https://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html)

Letterspacing and kerning are not the same thing (as explained on the page you linked to).

This seems to be the original blog post: http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeeper...

Interesting fact about Chicago — in addition to being the bitmap font in the original Mac system dialog boxes, and the original iPod display font, it was also repurposed by Square for the English translations of their famous 1990s RPGs: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III US, Secret of Evermore, etc

I have some serious UI nostalgia for that iPod.

The dogcow always deserves a mention:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow

The Icon Garden still lives on in the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010419010721/http://icongarden....

Moof!

The hidden glyphs were ack'd by the great lady reasonably recently: https://twitter.com/SusanKare/status/854071334262853632

... which was in response to http://suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2017/04/finderskeepers/ .

I loved the look of this font as a kid. I remember spending hours and hours trying to recreate this font on the zx spectrum from just magazine pictures and books as I couldn't afford a mac at the time.

The Apple logo persists to this day in Apple's fonts as U+F8FF (last entry in the Private Use Area): https://www.google.com/search?q=

Title is erroneous, it seems. The sheep is hidden in Geneva font. From the article:

"The 18 point version of Geneva includes all the characters you’d expect, and then, at position $D9, it has an adorable little sheep, shown at left. Other sizes of Geneva have different little icons in that location (a rabbit, a hieroglyph, a Mac icon). If you go down to the 9 point size, the sheep comes back again but is super tiny!"

There are other easter egg doodles hidden in other locations that aren't accessible through typing on the keyboard.

Enjoyable read, Susan Kare's Chicago font is rightly iconic.

My apologies. Yes, the sheep was in the Geneva font. I didn't realise that when I put up the title.

This is precisely why the guidelines [1] include this line: “please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. Don't editorialize” :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The title of the post is different.