This is a reaction to this post from Sebastiaan (Help us make it big on Digg!), which, by the way, I interviewed in the last English Pomcast. After reading his post I posted a commented but his blog would take out the video ;-) So here is my comment, this time with the video.
Somebody please remind Steve Jobs what he said during its Commencement address in Standford in June ’05. Full transcript here. Watch this video (after the jump) at about 3’20″…
Taken from All about Steve, the most amazing Website about 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.
