![]() ![]() And someone needs to make up for this typographic insult to Saipan. Some of these names are perfect for a great typeface. Territories: The US Territories are sadly overlooked.We need Gallup and Barstow to complete the set. Route 66: Nearly all of the cities mentioned in the song “Route 66” have a typeface named after them.If you’re a typographer or just interested in trying your hand at designing a new American font, I’ll leave you with a list of areas eagerly awaiting a font of their own: Challenges for Typeface Designers to Fill in the US Font Map As tempted as I was to use Mothman or Country Roads for West Virginia, the state could use some typographic love. This isn’t to say that America has no more room for fonts, in fact there’s a lot of open country to explore for typographic inspiration. If I had zoomed in on New York City, I could have added Battery Park, Bleecker, Bronx, Bushwick, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, Flatbush Beanery, Harlem, Lower East Side, Murray Hill, Park Slope, Sedgwick Avenue, Tribeca, Washington Heights, probably half a dozen typefaces named “Brooklyn,” and that’s hardly a complete list. California, the Great Lakes region, Texas and New York have more than their fair share. The concentration of fonts on the map largely follows the concentration of people (and designers). Is Huntington named for the city in West Virginia, or the library in Southern California? Is Hiawatha named for the town in Iowa, or does it belong in Minnesota by the shores of Gitche Gumee? Rainier, as is Tacoma, which is also a font. Tahoma is one of the pre-European names for Mt. Georgia, one of the more common fonts used today, got its name from a tabloid headline that read “Alien Heads Found in Georgia.” Fayette is based on the handwriting of an accountant who kept detailed records of the now ghost town of the same name on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Many of these fonts have stories that clearly tie them to a specific time and place. Some may also know these fonts by alternate names: Californian is also called Berkeley Old Style, Cupertino is clearly a play on Cooper Black, and Tombstone, eerily, was once offered under the name Jim Crow. San Francisco is both a modern font used by Apple and a long-gone font from early Macs designed to look like a ransom note. Typography fans will undoubtedly spot ones I missed, or know different fonts with the same name. There isn’t.) I finally found the limit to how many fonts I could use in one place. I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “Did I check to see if there’s a Boise font?” (I did. What started as a quirky challenge to make a US font map during COVID-19 quarantine days started to edge into obsessive-compulsive territory. That’s not actually the answer, it’s just where I had to stop, because the more I looked the more I found. Just how many fonts are named for American places? The US Font Map, featuring 222 typefaces named for American places. The friendly curves of Chicago no longer grace my font menu, but as the number of fonts online has grown and grown, it started to seem everywhere in America had its own typeface. Of course, typography didn’t start with the Mac, and it has hardly stood still since 1984. I made newsletters for my classes, typed and printed my reports wondering if I was even allowed to, and, without fail, used as many fonts per page as I could squeeze in. Words weren’t just words, they could be design, history, geography. Otherwise, I had MacPaint and MacWrite where I could draw and type whatever I could think of, and there was a menu of fonts to choose from - not just Chicago, but a list of fonts named for world cities. I got a text adventure game version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because a clerk at Egghead Software dropped a shelf on my mom’s head and gave it to her as a “please don’t sue us” gift. There wasn’t much to do on it right away. Both the smily Mac and the Chicago font that greeted anyone booting up a Mac in the mid ’80s were designed by Susan Kare, and they both captured the friendly, accessible new era of computing that made the Mac so revolutionary. Before 1984, I had never encountered the word “font.” Then a Macintosh computer showed up in my house.Ī beige block with a too-small black and white screen and a thingy called a “mouse,” the first thing I saw when I turned it on was “Welcome to Macintosh” in what I would soon learn was a font called Chicago. ![]()
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