With everyone sharing their thoughts on Apple’s new iPad, I thought I’d share mine, both of them.
- Is Steve Jobs the new Gutenberg? (See also here and here.) No, but he is possibly the new Aldus Manutius.
- The iPad introduces two screen formats: portrait at 1024×768 pixels and landscape at 768×1024 pixels. What are the implications for designing layouts?
Two posts, Part I today.
Jobs = Gutenberg? No, Aldus Manutius.
Think invention versus innovation. The inventor brings an idea to life; the innovator brings it into use. Television was invented in the 1920s but only came into use in the 1940s. Technology isn’t enough; society, culture, and economy also matter. Johann Gutenberg was an inventor. Though he built on others’ work, he himself formulated and resolved a series of technical challenges to implementing movable type: lead-alloy type, matrices for type-casting, oil-based inks. His 1455 Bible is a work of superb craftsmanship. Yet he by the end of the year he was bankrupt. Over the next four decades, printing technology spread through Europe (nice infographic here), but Gutenberg wasn’t the man driving it.
Neither was Aldus Manutius. He didn’t come along until the 1490s, when printing was well established, but he was an innovator. Aldus’s innovations were in design, not technology. He was a leader in the change from gothic to Roman types, and he invented italic type. He originated the role of the publisher and editor as separate from the printer. He is largely responsible for our current system of punctuation. His visual sense was perfect. His layouts are restrained, beautifully proportioned, and attentive to the tiniest details. Look at a printed book from the late 1400s: it’s essentially a mediaeval manuscript set in type. One of Aldus’s books from the early 1500s (shown at the top of this post) looks essentially like a modern book, one printed by angels, perhaps.
You see where I’m going here. Like Aldus, Jobs’ innovations have largely been experiential, concerned with the aesthetics and functionality of technology, not with technology itself. Whether or not the iPad does to book publishing what the iPod did to music, Apple (and particularly Steve Jobs) will be remembered for raising the bar on experiential design.
BTW, if the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (shown above, online here) is equivalent to a high-end Mac Pro, surely his early sixteenth-centure Latin classics are equivalent to an iPhone iPad. I’m not joking. They were small, light and relatively cheap; graced with a minimalist, all-type aesthetic and printed in an italic type mimicking the informal (or self-written) manuscripts that Renaissance scholar and students were used to. They were the first really portable books, and beautiful.
Sources for illustrations: pre-Aldus, Aldus I, Aldus II.
A skeptical view of the iPad.
Update: Feb. 12
I’m not the first person to connect Steve Jobs with Aldus Manutius.
Christopher Burd is a business analyst, writer, and information designer based in Victoria, British Columbia. His website is www.catchword.ca. You can follow him on Twitter.
