Alessandro Segalini

Visual design is important in reaching ethnic audiences, especially those for whom English is a second language. In the first seconds that a person views a message – before even reading a word, no matter what the language – it’s the images that hold the power to connect. It’s the images that make a viewer decide even whether to read a word.

The interactivity is not just in the design but it’s in the evaluation of the work.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. 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. 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. 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.

Some people say that letters exist to be read and therefore the things that interfere with legibility should be discouraged. (This is a bit like saying that the purpose of liquor is to get you drunk. If it were right, people would swig metal polish, and the farmers of Cognac, Burgundy, and Champagne grow potatoes.)

Read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas. If students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

In the first place, the typographer must be capable of analyzing ‘copy’ and if need be, re-ordering its structure. A thorough understanding of the use of English is essential for him to handle efficiently any material given to him.

Your words don’t mean anything to your students if they can’t translate them into physical actions.

How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread. State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix.

If you want to learn new things, you should try reading old books.