The Mac, calligraphy, and much else

[nancylebov]

A speech by Steve Jobs.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Link from Cyberscribes, a medium-traffic yahoogroup.

Comments

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

What a happy. :)

here via friendsfriends

[sperrywink]

Ha! I'm glad I saw your post! That is just so funny.
One of my older professors at Reed (Bert Brehm) bemoaned the increasing absence of hand-calligraphied senior thesis submissions. Computer printing just doesn't have the same individuality and elegance to him. It had mostly fallen out of favor by the time I attended (late 80's- early 90s). People really did care about their calligraphy there back in the day.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Jobs being self-important, egocentric, and ahistoric again.

The application of typeface aesthetics and design principles to the computer was inevitable, as soon as the screen was capable of it. Perhaps, without Jobs' calligraphy class, it would have taken longer and would have been introduced through a different direction. But it was an overdetermined thing, not a wild coincidence.

Anyway, I thought the early Mac typefaces were especially ugly, not especially beautiful.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Are those early Mac fonts online anywhere?

[halimede.livejournal.com]

That is so cool. And yeah, skipping classes can have cool effects. :)

[esmereldachubb.livejournal.com]

Coming late to the party, but fyi... most of those early fonts are still Mac fonts, just smoothed out a bit. I remember some of them, not all, from my early days playing on my dad's Mac.

And yeah, none of them were particularly pretty, not compared to the fonts you can find online today.