Font-size - Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Weirdly enough, font-size and typeface came up in two conversations I had last week. The first being at my internship, where two of the graphic designers sang the praises of Wired magazine and the typeface they developed. Although the text looked familiar to the naked eye, I was told that the font was intuitive enough to figure out certain spaces between characters and lines when placed together. As a result the paragraphs look tidier and the white rivers that appear between words when pages are viewed as a whole disappear into uniformity. Walbaum became Wiredbaum (and then changed again). Like Wired’s adaptation of a print magazine to the iPad, it’s a wonderful example of how analogue and digital technologies have converged, but there is more to font-size than specifics and innovations like that.

In fact, there’s so much more that any quick Google or Wikipedia search will keep you up for days on details of font-size. However, I think writing about that misses the point of these blogs. Instead of researching font-size and pouring out 500 words of other people’s work condensed into my own short blog post, I figured I would research the context of how we got to the topic of font-size in class.

(2010)

Fifteen minutes passed and I had finished watching Steve Jobs speak to Stamford’s 2005 graduating students. Yes he gets into details of calligraphy, typeface and font-size, but avoids any talk of why serifs are designed to slow our eyes down or what point size a newspaper uses. Instead, he talks about what impact they had on his life; how this led to the development of the Macintosh computer and how “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” (2005).

 

Steve Jobs' 2005 Standford Commencement Address - YouTube (2008)

So now I’m not going to think of font-size in a literal sense – instead I’ll put it in a context that I feel better suits Steve Jobs and the lecture we had in class. What is my calligraphy? Where will an intimate knowledge of something as overlooked as typography and font-size change my life?

I can’t answer that now, but Jobs offers us advice on how to get to the answer – stay hungry, stay foolish (2005). Out of context it is odd advice, but the point that he is making is that we should not be passive in life. People rarely stumble upon their vocation when they stand still, and we should all be passionate about things that take our interest because that tiny obsession you have about font-size could change the world. I’ll continue to wake up at ungodly hours to watch my favourite football team, embrace tinnitus at a young age by watching too many punk bands play in tiny rooms and spend countless hours on overnight buses through towns that are hardly on the map. They're definitely foolish passions, but one day I hope they'll be to me what something like typography and font-size were to Steve Jobs. Until then, I'll stay hungry and stay foolish.

Gregory Reher 2010, Vintage Apple Advertising | Bob Dylan - Gregory Reher, accessed 22/9/2011, http://gregoryreher.com/2010/10/vintage-apple-advertising-bob-dylan/

StanfordUniversity 2008, Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address - YouTube, accessed 22/9/2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Stanford University 2005,  Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement Address (2005), accessed 22/9/2011, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html