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Sunday
Feb282010

Steve Jobs | How To Live Before You Die

Apart from being a huge Apple fan, I admire Steve Jobs for all the innovation he's brought into the realms of computing & design. Seeing this video (a fifteen-minute video that is), and getting to know HOW he made it, was more than eye-opening. 

There are some parts of the video (from the 2005 Stanford Commencement) that made a great impression on me. The one that I love the most is the part where he says that he dropped out of college and didn't want to take the "normal" classes, so he took a calligraphy class. (which explains a lot)

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

 Whether you're a Mac or PC user, Jobs fan or not, the messages are there. It's worth the fifteen-something minutes. "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

The transcript of the commencement address can be found here.

Reader Comments (1)

'The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle"
March 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterMaria

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