Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal:

Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Modisett, the firm’s vice president of design, looked to the past.

He plowed through graphic-design books and tomes of logos featuring obscure examples like Hungarian oil companies from the ’80s. But he kept coming back to a slender, bookish typeface famously used in Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. Modisett in 2023 began slipping a cousin of the font into Perplexity’s software and marketing materials.

“It felt fresh,” he said.

Not anymore.

Apple’s custom variant of ITC Garamond was called, appropriately enough, Apple Garamond. Apple adopted it in 1984 with the introduction of the Macintosh, and continued using it through the early years of the Aqua/iMac aesthetic. For me it evokes the pinnacle of the six-color era. For Apple’s brand identity and marketing materials, after Apple Garamond came Myriad — which Apple commissioned custom variants of from Adobe. And then Myriad was succeeded by San Francisco, which I suspect still has many years ahead of it. For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco.

That this style of font is back in vogue is fun. It’s a good look. Friendly. Serious but not staid. The typeface a lot of these brands are using for this today is Instrument Serif, which I don’t love. It’s not bad. But it’s not great. Apple Garamond was great.

(ITC Garamond — but not condensed — served, distinctively, as both the display and body text typeface for O’Reilly books in their heyday. That typeface doesn’t look or feel Apple-like at all, nor does Apple Garamond look or feel O’Reilly-like at all.)

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Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards:

Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it may be as subtle as changing an L to look like an I).

If you’re satisfied that the redemption code is legible and undamaged, you can purchase the gift card by scanning the barcode on the other side. If staff question your decision to open it first, calmly explain why you were checking it and refer them to the image above if it helps.

The one major downside of this precaution is that it requires you to basically destroy the gift card packaging so if it’s intended as a present you may just have to give them the smaller inner card instead. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I’m not bashful, but I’d be very uncomfortable opening gift cards before I purchased them. The whole point of this is that gift card scams are on the rise. If I saw someone opening gift cards in-store before purchasing them, I’d think they were shameless scammers. If you need to destroy the retail packaging for a gift card to feel certain it hasn’t been tampered with, the whole system seems fundamentally broken. (And just eyeballing the redemption code doesn’t prove it hasn’t been tampered with.)