OCR-A
More info
- Creator
- American Type Founders
- Released
- 1968
- Type
- Typeface
The typeface drawn for machine eyes first and human eyes second — which is exactly why it served as visual shorthand for "computer" for half a century.
The optical readers of the 1960s tolerated no typographic variation, so American Type Founders drew a typeface in 1968 where every character differs maximally from every other: fixed width, uniform stroke weight, shapes chosen for the photocell rather than the eye. ANSI and later ISO (1073-1) standardized it, and the digits beneath a UPC barcode are set in OCR-A to this day.
Adrian Frutiger's OCR-B from the same year was the European counter-move — machine-readable but drawn for humans — and won out on passports and payment slips. OCR-A survived as aesthetics instead: when a designer wants to signal "computer", the angular characters still do the job, preferably in glowing green.