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Podcasts Take Two
Meet the Trappist monk who inspired Apple's iconic design
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Mar 8, 2016
Listen • 9:45
Meet the Trappist monk who inspired Apple's iconic design
Chances are that if you've opened a Mac computer or typed a few lines on a keyboard, you've probably used a font inspired by a former Trappist monk named Father Robert Palladino.
Father Robert Palladino, a Trappist monk, taught calligraphy classes at Reed College. One of his students was a young Steve Jobs, who briefly was a student at the college in the 1970s.
Father Robert Palladino, a Trappist monk, taught calligraphy classes at Reed College. One of his students was a young Steve Jobs, who briefly was a student at the college in the 1970s.
(
Photo by James Mason, Special Collections, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College
)
Father Robert Palladino taught at the renowned calligraphy department at Reed College. In the early 1970s, one of his students was a young Steve Jobs.
Father Robert Palladino taught at the renowned calligraphy department at Reed College. In the early 1970s, one of his students was a young Steve Jobs.
(
Photo courtesy of Robert Palladino's personal archive
)

Chances are that if you've opened a Mac computer or typed a few lines on a keyboard, you've probably used a font inspired by a former Trappist monk named Father Robert Palladino.

Chances are that if you've opened a Mac computer or typed a few lines on a keyboard, you've probably used a font inspired by a former Trappist monk named Father Robert Palladino.

Palladino was a master of calligraphy, a long-time teacher at Reed College in Oregon and a mentor to many – including a young drop-out many years ago named Steve Jobs.

Jobs was a student at Reed in the early 1970s. He dropped out of school after six months, but continued to take courses, including a calligraphy class taught by Palladino.

"To an open mind like Steve Jobs, inspiration comes from unexpected places," said Gregory MacNaughton, Education Outreach and Calligraphy Initiative Coordinator at Reed College's Douglas Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. "Handwriting and calligraphy had a huge impact on the designs of Steve Jobs."

Father Robert Palladino taught at the renowned calligraphy department at Reed College. In the early 1970s, one of his students was a young Steve Jobs.
Father Robert Palladino taught at the renowned calligraphy department at Reed College. In the early 1970s, one of his students was a young Steve Jobs.
(
Photo courtesy of Robert Palladino's personal archive
)

In recent years, MacNaughton worked closely with Palladino to revive calligraphy at Reed. He said Palladino was teaching up until January this year. He died last month and will be honored at a funeral mass in Portland Friday.

Reed's calligraphy program formerly ended in 1984, but at one point was considered the most well-known in the nation. Former notable students include the beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and Adobe designer, Sumner Stone.

Steve Jobs himself credited his time studying calligraphy with shaping his design aesthetics in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:



"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 sans 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 10 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 backward 10 years later."