Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement address

[iamom]

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer and now its current chairman as well as that for Pixar Animation, gave a great commencement address at Stanford.

Here's an interesting excerpt from the speech that follows his description of having taken a calligraphy course in college that taught him the difference between serif and sans serif typefaces, about changing the pitch of different letter combinations, and about making aesthetically-pleasing typefaces in general:

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.

To read the entire speech, go here:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html