This did not happen for the birth of the personal computer which was a differently technological act e therefore enormous in scope. It was also a highly aesthetic and consciously philosophical act. This diversity is due to the vision of the furious protagonist of this revolution, the young Steve Jobs, and to his passion for design, aesthetics and oriental philosophies.
Jobs was a child of the counterculture and for him technology was a means to get elsewhere. And in this elsewhere, the search for beauty was a kind of mission. And what is closer to the concept of beauty than calligraphy, for which Jobs had a real veneration? And it is precisely the story of the importance of calligraphy in the formation of Steve Job, in the birth of electronic publishing and digital aesthetics that we want to tell you.
Anyone passing through New York by September 16, 2018 can visit a very interesting exhibition on calligraphy at the Morgan Library & Museum, The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Correa do Lago Collection. In the halls of the museum, 140 pieces of the more than one hundred thousand pieces that make up the enormous collection of letters, autographs, handwritten notes of famous people that the Brazilian collector has collected over the course of his life are on display. It is an unmissable collection for graphology and calligraphy enthusiasts. In this video Pedro Correa do Lago talks about his collection and the exhibition in New York.
It all begins in Portland, Oregon
Calligraphy, like India and mind-enlarging substances, captured the imagination of young Steve Jobs. The family that had adopted him, the Jobs in fact, had formally committed to the biological mother to let Steve carry out higher education. Her mother, who had reluctantly consented to the adoption because none of the Jobs had college degrees, had finally consented to that commitment to study.
At 17 in 1972, four years before starting Apple Computers who turns 40 today, Steve Jobs began his studies at Reed College in Portland in Oregon, one of the most unconventional and expensive universities in the United States (the tuition of interns reaches 50 dollars a year). The campus of the Reed extends over an area of 20 thousand hectares and the NYTimes he called it "the most intellectual university in the United States."
Al Reed it is the humanities that excel and the liberal arts have enormous recognition. Thinking of the importance that Jobs later recognized to these aspects of human activity, it seems a paradox that he was not at ease with the courses he attended at the Reed. The studies seemed to him a great waste of time and money for his parents and so he decided to abandon the courses to attend only one, that of calligraphy.
Jobs himself recalls that choice thus: “I abandoned the ReedCollege after just six months. However, before leaving school for good, I crashed a course for another eighteen months". What was it about the handwriting that attracted Jobs? There was an intimate balance between the beautiful and the useful, between form and function which is what defines design.
The teaching of Robert Palladino
"Most of the things I stumbled upon at the ReedCollege and the reflections that stimulated me proved invaluable in my life… None of this seemed to have any immediate practical application in my life, but ten years later, when we were designing the first Mac, this experience came in handy… In the end it's all a matter of taste. You have to expose yourself to the best things mankind has ever produced and then try to put that into what you are doing".
With these words Steve Jobs described that experience in his speech on June 12, 2005, in front of the recent graduates of Stanford University.
The man who contributed so much to transmitting an unmistakable artistic and aesthetic sensibility to Jobs was his calligraphy teacher at Reed College, the Trappist friar Robert Palladino, unmistakably of Italian origins.
Robert Palladino's course stimulated not only dexterity, but above all reasoning, it trained the eye to discern the ways in which hundreds of variables can merge to create a harmonious effect. That “Divine Proportion” which another friar, the Tuscan fellow of Piero della Francesca and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, Luca Pacioli had defined with the help of Da Vinci in a famous homonymous treatise dated 1497.
Like Pacioli, Palladino was a singular character: he had become a monk living in seclusion, he had opposed the modernism of the Second Vatican Council, he had then abandoned e the priestly state to marry and then reacquire it after the disappearance of his wife.
This eccentric intellectual, similar to Jobs in this, represented a fundamental source of inspiration for the refined design of the co-founder of Apple, determining its precision, elegance, harmony, the proportion of the infinite elements that make up a technological object and the paranoid attention to every detail, even if not visible.
As a famous and seminal book by Andy says Groves, one of the founding fathers of the entrepreneurial culture of Valley and Jobs' mentor, "Only the paranoid survive." And Jobs was as paranoid as Palladino was in his pursuit of perfection.
Art as a supreme value
Calligraphy, i.e. decorative writing, is a spiritual, mystical, universal art, as it tends towards perfection by combining meticulous calculation with grace and merges with typographic art in the study of the interaction between characters on a given surface, in a synthesis of aesthetics and execution: proof that both pragmatism and beauty influence the final result of any project. A belief that has always been one of the pillars of Steve Jobs' vision.
Palladino's great merit was that of "instilling" in the founder of Apple the concept of art as an absolute value, which technology should try to approach in order to learn the secrets of perfection: "Picasso said 'good artists copy, great artists steal' and we've always been brash about stealing great ideas,” Jobs admitted himself in 1994, “I think the Macintosh has been so successful because it was created by musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who give themselves the if they were also the greatest computer experts in the world”. Technology is an applied art and cannot be separated from design.
The Mac, the postscript and the birth of the desktop publishing
In the field of typography, in fact, it can be said that the Macintosh, since the time of Gutenberg, has produced a real revolution (in 1984), allowing you to view on the monitor a result identical to what would have been obtained on a printed sheet. The Mac and its printer (the Laser Writer) were the first devices to support the page description language postscript developed by a start-up of the time, named Adobe, founded by two ex-Xerox PARC researchers.
The page description language postscript with its ability to describe characters with vectors instead of dots it turned the computer into a tool for compilation typography. This started a real revolution in the world of communication, graphics and publishing.
Il postscript it is a language based on mathematics and geometry, as were Pacioli's graphic elaborations. The postscript constructed a description of the page in which the elements that make it up, characters included, are geometric primitives (points, lines, curves of Bezier) to which properties can be assigned. These elements are described by the language based on their geometric location on the page determined by the coordinates of the primitives. One can never overestimate the innovative and revolutionary scope of this language in the birth of digital typography.
In fact the postscript allowed to put into practice something absolutely unprecedented for the time and also shocking: "Whatyou See Is what you Get” (WYSIWYG) — i.e. what you see is what you get.
Hence the newborn desktop publishing and the ability to access a huge range of fonts have enabled the rise and success of electronic typography, within the reach of all PC owners, and its ability to rival traditional typography which boasted centuries of experience and professional excellence. This is mainly due to the elegance required by Jobs in the design and typography of the Mac, a feature that has remained one of the hallmarks of the Californian brand.
The appearance of fonts is crucial in human-machine interfaces
Typography, in the sense of the look and form of type, was a major concern of Jobs and it is also of his heir Jonathan Ive. Typography is limited by rather rigid boundaries (the set of letters and numbers) and at the same time free to transform characters and glyphs whose basic structure has remained crystallized through the ages.
In addition to the skeleton of letters and numbers, however, there are infinite variations of intensity, thickness, space, there are more geometric characters or characters with softer lines, with a more or less oblique axis and naturally "with graces" (serif) and "without thanks” (St serif), i.e. those finishes at the ends of the letters and numbers typical of the classic Times New Roman or Garamond, for example. The former are more common in print and extended text, while the latter are more suited to screen reading and small print.
On screen, due to lower resolution than in print, san serif they are sharper, contrasted and distinguishable from the human brain. A psychometric research has shown how the Verdana, introduced by Microsoft, is the most legible font on the screen. Today's devices from Apple have SFDisplay, also a san-serif, as the text display font.
The beauty is that every single change has a certain effect on the observer, producing different sensations depending on the case, to the point that some fonts refer directly to very specific historical periods, from the Gothic-Medieval ones to the more modern and linear ones. Taking into account these infinite variables, technological companies, Apple in the lead, have carefully considered corporate fonts, both in marketing and in the user interface, opting for cleanliness and legibility of the sans serif.
Here's to what extent the experience of calligraphy has changed not only the life of Steve Jobs, but also the history of technology, returning to science its natural added value, i.e. art. Every microscopic element can be taken care of down to the smallest detail, because it can contain an important meaning, and the result is that a small, simple "i" is enough to describe the entire Apple universe.
We reproduce below, in the Italian translation and in Ilaria's adaptation Amurri, Tim's article Appeal by Title How handwriting changed Steve Jobs' life, published by “The Hollywood Reporter” magazine. In this article, Appello also a student of the Reed College and Palladino, has collected the memories of the friar teacher and tells the extensive experience of a calligrapher of Reed with Jobs.
Steve Jobs learned the art of calligraphy from a Trappist monk, thanks to whom he began a spiritual journey that would lead him to change the world.
I know where Steve Jobs' inspiration comes from, because I walked into the same place three months after he left, in 1974, and that place is the calligraphy center of the Reed College in Portland, Oregon. “The first impression I got was that all the students liked him,” says Robert Palladino, Steve Jobs' first calligraphy professor (and mine too). “I was surprised, because there was full of geniuses, while Steve had dropped out, yet others already sensed the greatness”.
The man who would go on to become one of the most sensational minds in the Valley was taught by a monk who had observed a vow of silence for years. "The Reed College at that time offered the best calligraphy courses in the country. On campus the posters, the signs were printed in beautiful typefaces,” he said in an address to Stanford graduates in 2005.
Having abandoned the official courses and therefore not having to follow the lessons according to the study plan, I decided to attend a calligraphy course to learn how to make beautiful things like the ones I saw on campus. I learned to use fonts serif and sans-serif, varying the spacing between the letters and whatever it takes to create beautiful writing. It was beautiful, ancient, and so artistically delicate that science could never achieve. All of this was fascinating.
The monks' handwriting gave Steve Jobs an aesthetic sense that tech giants (like Bill Gates) typically lack.
The second step, the Mac
“About two years later Steve returned to Reed to tell me that he was working with the computers in his parents' garage – says Palladino – He wanted to consult with me about my Greek alphabet”. As Jobs said at Stanford:
"…Ten years later, when we were designing the first Mac, this experience came in handy. The Mac was the first computer with beautiful fonts. If I hadn't dropped out of school, the Mac wouldn't have had so many typefaces. And if Windows hadn't copied the Mac, no personal computer today would have them. If I hadn't dropped out of class, if I hadn't stumbled upon that calligraphy class, computers today would be worse."
The one that Jobs had acquired at Reed it was not simply a calligraphy skill, but a mindset. Freshmen were told, "You are here to measure your mind against the person sitting next to you and against the greatest minds that ever lived." Dropout, suicide, and PhD admissions rates were skyrocketing, but social skills and grade point averages were low. At Stanford, grades below C weren't even recorded, while a Reed the courtesy C did not hesitate and the students were considered too pure to ask to know their grades. The goal was perfection. All that mattered to him was individualism, originality, ruthless meritocracy. Even the college crest was an image of fiery ambition: a flaming griffin.
Beyond perfection
“Steve's mind was like a flamethrower,” Tim says Girvin, calligrapher and former student of Reed who has designed logos for 400 movies, from Apocalypse Now a The Adventures of Tintin, but also for Jobs, who invited him to contribute to the creation of a Mouse-Activated Computer, i.e. a MAC. “Steve told me 'you have to come to Apple, I have to show you one What'. I was excited to participate in the typographic experimentation of a technology that was still shrouded in mystery. He had called me to work for him as an outsider, so that I could think of that design differently, in a new way”.
“The mouse, the pointer, was inside a sort of cardboard box from which a wire came out. 'Could you be able to draw a logo for the Mac with this pointer right on the monitor?', he asked me. I couldn't, the screen was small, the pixels too big. So I drew the logo and the computer by hand, all with a calligraphy pen.”
Jobs was definitely pleased with it, thankfully. “If he took a liking to you it was forever, how could you go beyond perfection? What else could you have done better? But if you screwed up it was the end. Steve had a temper, he would yell (although not at me), he would throw things around. He had a real goal, a road ahead, you either walked with him or you were out. Many said they were terrified of Steve Jobs and I think it was because of his great passion and the fire that fueled it. He longed to do new and extraordinary things”.
"Ethically speaking, Steve was the nicest guy in the world," says Palladino, who met him before he was throwing chairs in the air, "a really nice guy." Palladino's attempts to get back in touch with him after he became famous were rebuffed by the Apple offices, which responded with a silence more impenetrable than that of the trappists. After Jobs' death, however, Palladino received phone calls even from China, from people who wanted to know where the talent of the mythical genius came from. He was asked which actors were best suited to play him and Steve Jobs in the film adaptation of the biography written by Walter isaacson (released October 24, 2011), which was to be produced by Sony. "I don't watch many films", confesses Palladino, "I never saw a television until I left the monastery".
Connect the dots…
Jobs hired Girvin to carry out a number of projects throughout the year. “When he was born NeXT [computer company founded by Jobs in 1985], said to me 'Could you formulate a visual expression of the history of NeXT?'. He said that the brand was too severe and professional, that there was a need for greater expressive force, for a magical touch." For Steve Jobs, in essence, penmanship is the magic that brings science to life. “We almost always wrote by hand, the return to handwriting was part of our connection.” The last time they got in touch, seven or eight years ago, Girvin he found it changed. “He He had become much more calm. In the beginning he was so young, passionate, crazy, direct, he had a different energy. I think he just got calmer."
“The day he died I took mine iPad and I started making sketches of the Mac, starting exactly where we were thirty years ago”. He no longer needed a calligraphic pen, plus theiPad it costs much less than Palladino's Pelikan. “Today with theiPad you can take photos, write notes, draw and sketch ideas by bringing everything together in a single space”. Now Girvin he can do what he was asked a long time ago, "We've gone straight back to the initial dream."
