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)

Typographica

Well, if you didn't use/surf Typographica before, there's no excuse now. It's been redesigned this year, and it's such a great way to browse new (and old typefaces). They've decided to focus on type reviews, and leave the type discussions to the fine folks at Typophile, which is complete with a (get this) Typowiki.

Typographica's Best New Type of 2008 article (from April of this year) features an absolutely stunning new handwritten face called Memoir, designed by Stephen Rapp.

Trajan Whores

Yes and Yes. Yes I like it. Yes it's overused.

I admire Trajan, even though at this point Carol Twombly's type can seem soooo late 80s. What's cool about Trajan to me is that it refers to—surprise!—Trajan's column and is an homage to the incised proclamations on the column. But it's so overused—lazily and badly—that it's a typographical cliché, almost as bad as that your students's typographical chestnut, Papyrus.

I can see why you think of Trump and Trajan as evil twins.
TRAJAN's column is a monument in Rome to TRAJAN in TRAJAN's Forum to commemorate TRAJAN's victory in the Dacian Wars. The all caps face is perfect for a man like TRUMP who's built many a TRUMP Tower and TRUMP Hollywood and has had a few TRUMP cards in Atlantic City. Ego. Pride. Empires. It can get exhausting.

The Trump Hollywood logo is cleaner and less hackneyed, but the typography still lacks any detail and finesse and space. I do fear it's indeed the finished logo. At least it's used on the Trump Hollywood website, paired incongruously with a flirty flirty script (a nod to bikini babes?).





The most recent Ebert jacket (I'm not even going to talk about the earlier one) looks like an embryonic satire on movie titles and trailers. So many film titles use Trajan that there's a jokey film about it (which has no doubt been forwarded to you by at least 10 designers). My guess is that the jacket designer chose Trajan to evoke all those film titles and just didn't push it far enough.