Mac fonts went global because Steve Jobs rejected the commuter stops
Susan Kare’s first-person account preserves the small naming argument behind a familiar corner of the original interface.
The Macintosh font menu nearly included Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore and Rosemont. Those were stops on the Paoli Local, a naming scheme Susan Kare and Andy Hertzfeld could share because they had met in suburban Philadelphia. A menu familiar to millions began with geography familiar to two colleagues.
Kare’s “World Class Cities” account, dated August 1983, describes the work from inside the Macintosh team. Designing proportional screen type was part of her job. Unlike a monospace alphabet, proportional lettering could give a broad m more room than a narrow i. The menu needed names for the different designs the team was creating.
The bold system font began as Elefont, with a design intended to avoid jagged diagonals. The group wanted related, attractive names as the collection grew. Train stops supplied a ready-made family, and a little shared history supplied the reason to choose that particular line. Nobody needed to invent an entire fictional universe just to fill a font menu.
Jobs encountered the names while looking at the menu and asked what they meant. After hearing the commuter-line explanation, he approved the general idea of cities while rejecting its scale. Kare remembers his demand for “WORLD CLASS cities!” The typography had suddenly acquired a travel budget (approval pending).
Chicago replaced Elefont. Kare also lists New York, Geneva, London, Toronto and Venice among the resulting names. San Francisco replaced Ransom, the mismatched-letter design whose original name evoked a cut-out ransom note. The new naming family therefore tied together styles that had initially received names describing quite different things.
The useful historical distinction is between the appearance of the letters and the choice of label. Kare tells how the labels changed; the account does not establish a secret one-to-one translation from every commuter stop to every later city. A satisfying naming story can survive without filling in the bits its participant never supplied.
The anecdote also captures a real interface problem. Related names help a menu feel coherent, while an inside reference can mean almost nothing to the person using it. A developer choosing labels today could try the same quick exercise: show the menu to someone outside the project, then ask what each choice suggests before explaining the joke.
Evocative labels still carry a cost. A city name alone does not describe a typeface’s weight or intended use, so the reader needs to see the design to make a choice. Familiarity can make an arbitrary name feel descriptive after years of use. For someone encountering it fresh, the connection has to be learned.
Kare’s recollection leaves the original train-stop menu as a tantalizing alternate route through Mac history. The shipped names became ordinary enough to conceal the argument that produced them. Somewhere between a Philadelphia commute and an Apple font list, a short train trip became international travel.
Chicago made the connection.