Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Steve Jobs on typography

This summer I've been reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, so I'm inspired to post some of the more interesting quotes regarding design that I've found.














Here's Steve Jobs talking about typography:

"The minute I dropped out [of Reed College] I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting," he said.
Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and sans 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."
...."If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would 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." (p41)

2 comments:

Beth Tondreau said...

A great quote and a great photo (who took it?). Jobs made science an art by making it intuitive as well as functional—or making people make it work beautifully in more ways thant one.

Suzanne Dell'Orto said...

Couldn't find a credit for that photo, but it took awhile to find one that was not so obvious.

After reading that book, though, I have to say that for all his innovation he could be extremely and unnecessarily cruel and abusive.

He believed that normal rules for everyone else didn't apply to him: he never had a license plate on his car, parked in handicapped spots (sometimes straddling the lines so he took up two spaces), told a cop to hurry up when he was getting a speeding ticket and then sped away...I had a boss like that before I worked with you and it was extremely unpleasant.