How Steve Jobs helped us write

ITH all the tributes paid to Steve Jobs over the years, one vital contribution is often overlooked: his profound influence on how we write—not just the act, but the way we express ourselves through the beauty of type.

- VR FEROSE (The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books)

ITH all the tributes paid to Steve Jobs over the years, one vital contribution is often overlooked: his profound influence on how we write—not just the act, but the way we express ourselves through the beauty of type. Into a digital world once dominated by cold, clunky pixels, Steve brought elegance and emotion.

As Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, notes, "Jobs was the first to give us a real choice of fonts, and thus the ability to express ourselves digitally with emotion, clarity and variety. He made Type Gods of us all."

Steve didn't invent fonts. What he did was something far more radical: he made typography matter, reminded us that words are visual experiences. As he narrated in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address, a calligraphy class at Reed College, taught by Professor Robert Palladino, introduced him to the artistry of letters, spacing, and line forms.

Years later, those lessons in pen and ink found their way into the original Macintosh, which became the first personal computer to offer a suite of typefaces.