Steve Jobs was a Renaissance man of many talents. But what set him apart from other technology titans was his artistic sense. He continually used the word “taste” in explaining what was ready to be manufactured at Apple, and what wasn’t ready yet -- what he had to reject. The Apple computer, the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod are all striking objects because the clarity of their visual design matches the relative ease by which they function. It’s clear that Jobs had artistic sensibilities and that his self-expression was multi-leveled: it was an acute visual sensitivity that extended outward to a way of thinking about how things worked and how different variables could interact with each other in a harmony pleasing to consumers.
In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Jobs gave generous credit for his ultimate success to an innocuous source -- a calligraphy course that he took while at Reed College, one established by a maverick professor named Lloyd Reynolds and continued by Father Robert Palladino. Upon closer examination, Jobs was not the only so-called “genius” to benefit from Reynolds’ teaching: Poet Gary Snyder, the poet and Zen master Philip Whalen and entrepreneur Peter Norton of Norton Utilities, were other notable students.
Reynolds began teaching calligraphy at Reed College in 1938 as a no-credit course (it became full-credit in 1948). His art credentials were laughably non-existent; he had actually gone to Reed to teach in the English department. But his interest in calligraphy dated back to 1924, when he had worked briefly for a greeting card and sign company, and largely through self-teaching he had gained experience in what was regarded as a quaint, but arcane art form.
Reynolds’ calligraphy class eluded simple definition: It focused on mastering a prosaic skill -- letter writing -- and for that reason was always viewed with some bemusement by other college faculty, as it seemed to them as ‘unserious’, like lessons in basket weaving rather than a conventional college-level course. But for Reynolds, writing letters was an all-embracing and mystical skill which took considerable artistry and thought. In his mind, to execute it properly required a comprehensive understanding of the art and culture that gave rise to particular modes of writing.
To him, when one writes, he or she is doing so in the same general motions that Queen Elizabeth 1 made while she doggedly learned cursive as a young woman, the same as Leonardo and Michelangelo and countless educated scribes throughout the ages as they recorded their thoughts and ideas. In other words, one was upholding great classical traditions at the very heart of what societies considered as culture.
Consequently, Reynolds’s classes were never simply about the mere mechanics of writing –- they were about the very holistic nature of everything. Reynolds’ three greatest enthusiasms were the “Three Bills”: William Blake, the poet and painter of mystical visions; William Morris, the master of Arts and Crafts; and William Shakespeare, the playwright who imbued the English language with its beauty . But his enthusiasm for “The Big Three” was mixed in with religious interests -- he was fascinated by Zen Buddhism -- and also associated with leftist politics (he was once called up in front of the Joe MCarthy’s infamous Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities).
For Reynolds, learning to write well, was key to achieving a kind of mystical, spiritual harmony with the universe linked to attaining such progressive social goals as ending poverty and racism and achieving world peace. His classes were peppered with seemingly disparate topics ranging from Michelangelo to William Blake to Zen Buddhism, yet it all somehow made sense to the students. As a teacher, Reynolds was blessed with the ability to connect the dots in a way which made learning vibrant and relevant.
In essence, Reynolds was the rare kind of educator who enjoined his students to reflect about what’s good and significant and why, in a boundary-busting way that disregarded traditional walls between academic disciplines. It was a mode of free-range thinking that resonated with the young Jobs, who rebelled against conventional education, which he found unchallenging. Years later, Jobs defined taste as: “…trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”
In the way of such things Reynolds’ very successes -- huge student attendance, teaching and art awards, even a television show –- tended to make enemies, who viewed all this attention as ‘hype’ -- proof that what he was doing wasn’t academically rigorous, but instead was shallow, bereft of intellectual content and ultimately unworthy of a place in academia. Each year he battled for the survival of his class against an ever-growing coalition of enemies. Eventually, Reynolds bowed out when his wife became terminally ill. To continue his legacy he chose a spiritual figure, a former Trappist monk and monastery scribe, Father Robert Palladino, under whose care calligraphy remained the most popular elective offering at Reed. But Palladino, who had spent much of his life sheltered under a religious vow of silence, was acutely inexperienced and ill-equipped to oppose the secular black arts of faculty politics and convoluted faculty arguments. In 1984, six years after Reynolds’ death, the art department shut down the calligraphy class, ostensibly because it didn’t fit with the new mission of focusing entirely on “modern art,” whatever that meant.
Somewhat dispiritingly, this pattern of politics is all too familiar to anyone who has been exposed to what passes as educational institutions. It comes from a dogmatic preference for following the regulations, and inventing new regulations if pre-existing ones are not extant, to make teaching tidy, measurable and predictable. In other words, to reduce to the status of meh and blah what should free the powerful combination of imagination and experience that marks human progress and adventure. The philosopher Plato, who had the tendency to view artists as renegades threatening the clockwork precision of his relentlessly logical state, wanted to banish them from his ideal Republic, and true artists seem to always exist with the malingering threat of banishment hovering over them -- or (as in Ai Weiwei’s case) worse. When the course on calligraphy was eliminated, Reed College seemed somehow diminished.
Steve Jobs entered Reed in 1972 and dropped out after six months. But he then elected to “drop in”, ‘auditing’ classes for another year, while sleeping on the floor of friends’ rooms, collecting Coke bottles for money and availing himself of free vegetarian meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. To him the most inspiring classes were calligraphy. As Jobs recalled in his iconic commencement address:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. … 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.”
From this statement, it’s clear that there is a through-line between the stylish graphics we take for granted on computers with calligraphy class. For while Jobs’ other merits might be a matter of continual debate, what is undeniable was his genius for popularizing technology, making it accessible for masses with an almost preternatural ability to sense the next ‘big thing.’ So too with calligraphy, and Jobs would continually make comments about this many times throughout his life, an achievement in which he took particular pride.
But studying calligraphy was more than a matter of nice typography.
Typography is a somewhat dichotomous art form, which operates with unusually tight restraints, yet is also amazingly free. The basic forms of letters have stayed static for centuries, and the order in which they go is generally fixed by the text. But within those seemingly rigid parameters there’s room for considerable variation in shape and spacing, of shifts from delicate to bold, and of many other things. Seemingly modest changes can completely change the overall effect for good or ill, and can make the letters trigger entirely different emotions. There’s even an element of history involved, as different letter forms are redolent of varying historical periods. Most crucially, a great piece of typography works as an ensemble: a wrong mark can throw off the entire effect. And a little accent can sometimes lift something a harmonious but dull note to the level of a symphony.
By developing his mastery of typography, Jobs by extension developed mastery of design: the ability to think about how hundreds of different variables can coalesce to create a harmonious effect that overcomes meh and attains the level of cool. This is the skill that he practiced with devastating effect (on competitors) at Apple, transposing it from the world of letter forms to that of product design. In a 2004 Businessweek interview Jobs noted that: “Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe.”
What pulls it all together, is art. As in music, architecture, engineering, medicine and many other disparate professions almost every task that involves a form of planning and design measures success by one person’s ability to force functional harmony from many different, even contradictory elements. The only means to achieve this is via art. No less a figure than Albert Einstein built upon the work of predecessors like Newton, Faraday, Lavoisier, du Chatelet and Meisner through his ability to synergize their findings. That he happened to love violin playing and classical music endowed him with imagination, wonder and improvisation which allowed him to overcome his limitations as an undisciplined mathematician.
As for Jobs, he always thought of himself not as a manager but as a leader -- an artistic visionary. After the fashion of an artist, Jobs ultimately based his decisions not on the recommendations of committees or focus groups (Apple famously had none during his tenure) but on his own intuition and inspiration -- often on factors neither easily expressed nor analyzed in words. Perhaps most important, at some level, his mastery of visual skills was transposed to another level as well. Visual harmony became a sort of metaphor for what happens when everything works well together: when at a glance we can instantly understand a large field of variables, and see that everything coordinates with everything else and they all can be made to collaborate with a unified purpose.
Through mastering calligraphy, Jobs learned to think like an artist. It became the skill that separated him from other technology business leaders. It enabled him to be that single lemming in the pack who had the good sense of putting on a life preserver while the others were busy drowning themselves in the whirlpool of what is versus what could be, to build out of almost nothing the world’s most valuable corporations and to revolutionize modern life. We usually think of art as essentially a recreational activity: as something that stands apart from the serious, repetitive business of life. But art does matter. When all is said and done, it’s the thing that makes it possible to have a world that holds together that is both beautiful and makes sense.
Genius can never be reduced to a single source. Yet it’s intriguing to note that one of the keys to Jobs’ success, to all that he achieved, is that, years ago, before even the outset of his amazing career, he took a controversial and inspiring art class, and had a teacher bold enough to colour outside the lines.