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Doing the little happy dance tonight because my quilt “Daughters of Daughters” was accepted as part of the third and final year of the “I Remember Mama” exhibit which will debut at the International Quilt Festival in Houston later this year. I was anxiously awaiting any news, and I’m quite pleased with both the quilt and the news.

Go here and read Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford. I was especially tickled by this:

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.

Wow. I myself lucked into a wonderful calligraphy teacher at SUNY Albany when I returned to the Albany area, not long out of college, and wondering what I’d do next. I learned so much about design and perserverence and the importance of practice and hard work. I learned about the shape of letters and how the shape of the spaces around and inside the letters are as important as the shapes of the strokes that make them. The connection between the practices and traditions of the past and the work done today. The importance of appropriateness and usability. And like Steve would say, the supremacy of user interface. Readability/usability rules!