· By Andre Woolery
Steve Jobs, Art Meets Science
Steve Jobs' Application of Calligraphy
Steve Jobs enrolled at Reed College in fall 1972. After six months, he dropped out but stayed on campus for eighteen months, auditing classes that interested him. Throughout campus, every poster and label was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Jobs decided to take a calligraphy class taught by Robert Palladino, a former Trappist monk who had taken over Reed's calligraphy program after eighteen years of monastic life.
Jobs learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, varying the space between different letter combinations, and what makes great typography great. He found it "beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture." As he later told the Stanford graduating class of 2005: "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life."
Ten years later, designing the first Macintosh in 1984, it all came back. Apple built it all into the Mac, which became the first computer with beautiful typography, multiple typefaces, and proportionally spaced fonts. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college," Jobs said, "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."
A computing breakthrough emerged from an ancient art form. As Jobs put it: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."
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To explore the full framework behind this story, pull card #58 in the Creative Mastermind Deck
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