Steve Jobs: The 1 Bit Mac fonts portraits

Mosaic portraits of Steve Jobs and Susan Kare made out of the typefaces of the first Mac. 1 Bit Color (just black and white) to emulate the original Mac look'n'feel. Created for the Steve Jobs month on Typorn.org and made using the fonts designed by Susan Kare for the original Macintosh during the early 80s.

Three years have already passed without Steve Jobs. 

On October 5th, 2014, my good friends at Typorn.Org launched a special feature on Steve Jobs' life focusing on his contribution to typography. For the occasion, they have asked me to create a series of typographic mosaic portraits to illustrate their articles and to be printed as commemorative posters.

I have decided to base my work on a series of photos taken in the early 80s by the renowned South African rock-star photographer Norman Seeff. The mosaic portraits were created using the first set of Macintosh fonts, designed by interface designer Susan Kare. I have used six early typefaces in my illustrations.

Reminiscent of the early days of Macintosh and its iconic typefaces, I have chosen these portraits of Steve Jobs and Susan Kare to be 1-bit images - just like the ones made by MacPaint, one of the first digital art programs. In fact, all shades of grey are made up of black and white pixels.  In the first Jobs poster, I used the Chicago and Monaco fonts; in the second and third, I used  Chicago, Monaco, and Geneva. In the portrait of Susan Kare, I used all six fonts - Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York, Athens, and San Francisco.

The details:

Typorn.Org website

You can download the high-resolution posters from here.

Partially based on photography by Norman Seeff.

Typefaces by Susan Kare.

Made with custom-developed scripts, hacks, and lots of love, using my Macs, Studio Artist, the Adobe Creative Suite, and good music by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Many thanks to Panos Vassiliou, Loukas Karnis, and everyone at Typorn.org and Parachute Fonts.

Thank you for all your comments and appreciations.