Calligraphy - - - -> Typography
Most people would already be knowing about Steve Jobs' recent Commencement address at Stanford. A nice irony. Not the first time though. These things have happened before as well. Anyway, that's not the point I am making. Consider the following set of statements (an excerpt from the speech.
In fact, he gives a clear hint that this is a logical fallacy in the last couple of lines - Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
I wonder why people make such sweeping generalizations. I understand that the whole thing is said in a moment of sensation. Still we can't simply let it go. Does Steve mean to say nobody else might have ever thought of fonts and typography for computers? The maximum he could probably say is - if I had not attended the calligraphy classes the Mac might not have had the beautiful fonts. That's acceptable. But that too is a logical fallacy. He or someoneelse might have come up with the idea even without those calligraphy classes. In fact, the above set of statements is a logical fallacy for more than one reason. It's a case of cum hoc ergo propter hoc or correlation implies causation.
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. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
In fact, he gives a clear hint that this is a logical fallacy in the last couple of lines - Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
