Today I drove master typographer Matthew Carter to the Cape today for our upcoming SIMPLICITY meeting and we had a nice chat on the way here. I first met Matthew when visiting Bitstream (a pioneer in digital typography) in the mid 80's as an innocent student on a field trip. At the time the Web was not yet built, and software tools were in their nascent but excitingly wild state of development. There were no rules nor dominant players in the creative tools industry and really everything was fresh and surprising. But then, companies like Adobe and Apple moved in to sort of MacDonald-ize the playing field of creativity into a business that every year seems to become less and less creative.
Matthew shared with me that he still uses Mac OS 8.1 and an earlier version of Fontographer running on an old G3 ... something about being so used to its idiosyncracies that although he can surely afford the latest computers and software, he sticks to what works perfectly for him. It struck me that creativity is not in the newest gadget or technology available, but instead within the ability to focus. This wonderful computer thingamajig keeps us so defocused throughout the day that we tend to forget how to focus. Au contraire, I am there.
Posted by maeda at March 26, 2006 05:55 PM