ZX Chicago

Susan Kare’s iconic Chicago shipped with the original Apple Macintosh in 1984 and was the standard system font until MacOS8 replaced it with the TrueType Charcoal look-alike. It did receive a dust-off in 2001 to become the primary font on the newly launched iPod range.

I created this font around 1990 using Artist II on a Spectrum +3. Chicago wasn’t quite so iconic back then, and the real challenge was trying to get a 12-pixel high proportional font into an 8x8. (MacOS has a 9pt ‘Chicago’ that is devoid of the distinctive bold flair). In order to retain the tall, narrow style, I reduced the character widths. In early 2021 I added a “Twiggy” variant based on screenshots of the Mac prototypes that sported an earlier version of Chicago.

In mid 2022 I replaced an earlier attempt at a wider variant with “ZX Chicago Pod” which takes cues from the original iPod variant and goes with later lowercase at the expense of ascenders and descenders.

It achieves the job of looking like Chicago while not being too similar at a pixel level. It’s the feel of the 12-point font using some of the style from the 10-point. I’d think this is what the 9pt should have looked like with some tweaks for mono-space and low-res readability.

This font works well for titles and large bodies of text, although, could benefit from a proportional renderer.