In a new video shared this week by 512 Pixels, Stephen Hackett looks into the history of Clarus the Dogcow, a bitmapped image designed as part of the Cairo font for use on the Macintosh. While starting as part of a simple font language, Clarus grew to prominence on Mac over the years, becoming a popular part of Apple iconography throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
As Hackett explains in his video, Clarus was designed by graphic designer Susan Kare in 1983. Kare created the various fonts for the Macintosh’s user interface, and one font in particular had a unique set of glyphs and images to represent the alphabet, referred to as a dingbat font. The letter “z” was represented by a small creature that appeared to merge a dog together with a cow.
Read more at MacRumors.com