Let’s talk about something absolutely frivolous today. The tiny icon displayed in your broswer for sites, which is called a “favicon.” This is the original favicon I made in 2014 when I first set up a website. I believe I just popped open GIMP, threw in a serif typeface and spelled out my initials.
This is fine, though bland. It served me well until I busted it on my webserver setup and started serving the whole site on favicon.ico (oops!) Fixing it has given me an opportunity to make something new. Still black text on a white field (until such a time as I find a new color scheme) and still my initials. But I wanted to pick a more unique typeface. Something that really spoke to me.
When I was first exposed to computer typography it seemed like a good idea to use zany fonts in the school papers I submitted. One I probably used the most was called Techno by David Berlow. I certainly remember the feel of a full paper written in Techno–not particularly legible (especially with my atrocious grade-school spelling) but extremely slick and modern looking. It loudly proclaimed itself as something you typed into one of these amazing ‘computer’ machines (or perhaps into the microscopic screen of an alphasmart.) All that optimism and retro cred was perfect. Techno was the font for me. So I went to see if anyone had uploaded it…
Nope! It still seemed to only exist as something you could use on Classic Mac OS, the long-gone operating system last seen on the iconic G3 iMac. I saw some fonts that appeared close (ie here) but the kerning was wrong and the name is unfortunately used to refer to a type of futuristic font instead of the specific one I was looking for so googling was getting me nowhere. And I’m not the only one who was looking for it either! Luckily, we can emulate an iMac and run OS9 to create an image.
With a little bit of cropping and tweaking on the capital E, we have a new favicon:
I could stop there, but needing to emulate a twenty seven year old operating system just to get a font isn’t an adventure for everyone, so why not bring these fonts into the present? Simply copying the font files out will result in resource fork problems but luckily there was a period correct app called Font Clerk which could convert them into regular true type fonts. Here are the fonts on internet archive for your enjoyment. There may be a couple of extras in there because I installed Microsoft Word to get the above screenshot.
