Doesn't Quite Explain Wing-Dings Though

To All Presenters:

On June 12, 2005 Steve Jobs was invited to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford University. The broad topic of his presentation was one never really knows what experiences are going to be critical to one’s life, until one has a chance to look back and see the coincidences.

Perhaps the most significant formative experience in Steve Jobs’ life, the one he spent a good amount of time emphasizing in his speech, was the advantages of dropping out of college. This is why Steve is never invited to speak at orientation.

Dropping out of college allowed Steve the opportunity to take courses he wanted to take, to learn about things he found interesting instead of being compelled to learn what the institution required to confer a degree. So amongst other seemingly random academic explorations - Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class. There he was introduced to the beauty of serif and san serif typefaces, to the importance of varying the space between characters and to the impact an artist could achieve when curvy waves of copy are juxtaposed with more rigid blocks of text.

Steve enjoyed the class. The memory of the experience and the acquired knowledge stayed with him even as he moved away from an academic setting and stepped onto the 10-year path that would ultimately define Steve’s personal and professional life.

The original Macintosh computer was designed to serve as the first home-use personal computer, but was soon positioned as a creative tool. The system launched the age of desktop publishing, which some original programmers saw as a computer combination of typewriter / layout table - fairly sterile, but easy to manipulate. Steve saw publishing as an art form – he saw publishing as design. As part of this evolution he called upon his experience in the calligraphy course many years before. He wanted to provide the creative population who would become the first true graphic designers of the computer age with a complete toolset they could use to achieve their artistic vision. Thus the Mac became the first computer with truly beautiful typography, and Tahoma, Arial, Times New Roman, along with the power of proportionally spaced fonts - found their way into a computer.

The conceptual leap around the techno-sphere was simple, since Windows copys everything Mac does (per Steve) they too included a variety of font selections in their software. This universality of concept gave birth to a cottage industry where artists design new fonts for computer applications - after a few short years this became multi-million dollar enterprise.

Henceforth creativity abounds, and that which was unheard of outside high-brow calligraphy courses is now considered a technology standard, because Steve Jobs dropped out of college and audited an art class.

THE POINT: Embrace innocuous opportunity – you never know where the next game changing idea will come from.