Workshops

Steve Jobs and the impact of calligraphy on his lfe

Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple Computer talks about his college experience and how a random calligraphy course had a major impact on a career he didn’t know he’d have. He talks about dropping out of college, foregoing those courses he really didn’t want to take and instead ‘drop-in’ on those that took his interest.  Most of which he stumbled into by sheer curiosity, that turned out to be invaluable several years later in his life.

Reed College at that time offered one of the best calligraphy instructions in the country.  The campus was littered with pamphlets, poster, labels on equipment etc.  As Steve had dropped out and wasn’t obligate to take the normal classes, he decided to take a calligraphy class to learn this art form.  Quote:  “I learnt about serifs and sans serifs typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letters and 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 10 years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me and we designed it all for the Mac” …