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What's wrong with Chicago? Chicago was genius. Old Macs had black and white screens, no grayscale. But grayed-out text was a necessity for showing disabled o
by pak 16y ago
What's wrong with Chicago? Chicago was genius. Old Macs had black and white screens, no grayscale. But grayed-out text was a necessity for showing disabled or unavailable items in the desktop GUI Apple was developing. Most bitmapped fonts are completely unreadable if they are checkerboard-dithered to appear at 50% gray on a black-and-white screen, because they have mostly one-pixel lines in their glyphs. However, the 2px-wide vertical lines of 12pt Chicago allow it to be completely readable when dithered to 50%.
It was a font built for specific requirements; on today's million-color screens it's out of place, but at the time it was introduced, it made perfect sense.
- soyelmango 16y agoNothing's wrong with Chicago, and what you write reinforces the point that often fonts are built for specific requirements, and then used by others in aesthetically inappropriate situations. Just as Comic Sans was made for screen use by MS Bob, Chicago was made for use on a 1-bit screen - but then both were used in print, and they both suck in print, and even more so at sizes larger than on-screen. (By the way, that's interesting about the designed-in ditherability of Chicago - thanks for that.)