10.06.2011

ode to calligraphy.

This morning I sat down at my {iMac} computer to discover ~ as most of you did ~ that Steve Jobs passed away.  I could not help but think just how so many of us designers are in debt to him & his creativity.


Later, I had the pleasure of reading his commencement speech that he addressed to Stanford University back in 2005.  And you know what he credited?  Calligraphy.




"And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
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, it's 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."  ~ Steve Jobs

So in honor of Mr. Jobs & his appreciation for calligraphy, I share with you the typography work of Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Hische.







~ Bonnie

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