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Condensed Serif Typefaces, à la Apple Garamond, Are Back in Vogue
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.)
Sources: Riot Games is working on a major overhaul of League of Legends, internally called League Next, for 2027; Riot confirms a big update is in the works (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg:
Sources: Riot Games is working on a major overhaul of League of Legends, internally called League Next, for 2027; Riot confirms a big update is in the works — A refreshed version being called ‘League Next’ is planned for 2027 — Riot Games is working on a major overhaul of its flagship game League …
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Pennsylvania's Supreme Court rules that police can get Google search data without a warrant; an expert warns it may encourage warrantless searches nationwide (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
Suzanne Smalley / The Record:
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court rules that police can get Google search data without a warrant; an expert warns it may encourage warrantless searches nationwide — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police did not need a warrant to obtain a convicted rapist's Google searches when investigating the crime.