Discussion Point - Katrina Hirakis

Derek Birdsall (1934 - present)

Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1934 Derek Birsall has grown to become a designer that emphasises the beauty of typography. 

His talent started at the young age of fifteen when he joined Wakefield Collage of Art choosing to study lettering. During his three years at Wakefield he, "dabbled in letterpress, bought a printing press of his own and began to manufacture cards for local businesses". Later, Birdsall was accepted into 

the Central School of Art and Design in London 1952 where he was taught the difference between beautiful lettering and typography proper, with its pre-eminent concerns of clarity, directness and textual legibility. 

In 1967 Birdsall started his own studio naming it 'Omnific' wherein he designed for Penguin books with a complete re-style of the 1970 education series, art-directed Town and Nova magazines, designed advertisements and literature for Lotus cars and Mobil Oil in New York and produced the series of Pirelli calendars (work by which he is best known for).

The preface of Birdsall's 2004 book notes on design introduces, "

simply the decent setting of type and the intelligent layout of pictures based on a rigorous study of content. This is the organising sensibility of all great graphic designers, who manage to contrive tension and sublimity within the exercise of reason. His innocuous recommendation is also, curiously enough, shared by avant-garde mentors of today including Rem Koolhaas and John Thackara: the sense that design needs to be re-conceived as the organisation of what already exists, 

rather than as the deliberate creation of novelty. 

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)

Steve Jobs was not only a business man but also a dedicated designer and someone who many might know of his past. Jobs attended Reed College where, "throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed". Though later dropped out and decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to create such pieces of work that he saw at collage. In this class Jobs learned about serif and san serif typefaces, varying the amount of space between different letter combinations and what makes great typography great. In his words, "it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating". 

Jobs furthered his fascination with computers and took no note of how he could apply his calligraphy life. Though ten years later when first designing the Mac computer a connection between the two were made. As jobs states, "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, its 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". 

References:

Derek Birdsall - http://designmuseum.org/design/derek-birdsall

Steve Jobs - http://www.planet-typography.com/news/typo/steve-jobs.html