New York Times, on the death of Reverend Robert Palladino:
Mr. Jobs briefly attended Reed in 1972 before dropping out for economic reasons, but hung around campus for more than a year afterward; during that time, he audited Father Palladino’s class. After helping to found Apple in 1976, he often credited the company’s elegant onscreen fonts — and his larger interest in the design of computers as physical objects — to what he had been taught there.
And this quote from Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 Stanford commencement address:
“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, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
A teacher who helped kindle a great flame of passion.
[H/T The intangibly metonymical Not Jony Ive]
I like to think I learned a lot of useful stuff in college that had little or nothing to do with my major. Most of that useful stuff would fall under the category of “liberal arts,” and ever since then it has helped me do better work than I’d otherwise be capable of.
I’m glad to have had that opportunity, before a time when such an education would have put me in debt for years, if not decades.