Sysfont by Alina Sava

Sysfont by Alina Sava

This is a revival of Susan Kare’s original Chicago, the default typeface in Apple’s System (80s operating system, MacOS’s precursor).

Free for both personal and commercial use, licensed under SIL OpenFont license.

How I created Sysfont

I manually drew it from scratch as pixel art in Adobe Illustrator and generated the font files with FontSelf for Illustrator. Some differences from the original are possible for the diacritics and punctuation symbols, as I only had a low-res A-Z a-z 0-9 screenshot of the original to work with. All diacritic marks and symbols were complete guesswork.

I manually kerned it, though there is a bit of room for future improvement.

Naming process

Chicago is a typeface name trademarked by Apple, so I named mine Sysfont, hinting to the operating system name (System Software) the original was created for.

Webfont

To use the webfonts provided, add this in your CSS file:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Sysfont';
  src: url('sysfont.woff2') format('woff2'),
  url('sysfont.woff') format('woff');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}
This font was originally created for 8Bit WordPress theme, a theme inspired by System Software.
Category
Language support
Latin Extended (Western European, including Icelandic)
Format
OTF, WOFF, WOFF2
License
SIL Open Font License    → Licenses explained
Tags
Author

Sysfont

Font preview image