Wow! After watching this TED talk, it fund it super relevant not only to typography, but to almost all aspects of life. The main message of not compromising is very philosophical and really helps to turn perspectives around. For me, one of the examples that stood out is when the speaker starts to talk about the period on technological infancy in the mid 80s. The issue now was about the size of the fonts, and the way it was being designed using vector technology. For serif fonts, a lot of vector points were being used to create the elegant fonts, which resulted in the sans serif being more economical.

 

However, the speaker goes on to say that when he designed a serif without the curve, instead using polygonal, it became a design solution for a non-existing problem because the engineers had already solved that issue the week before using code, which meant that now they could have as my different types of font on the computer with no problem. While this meant that the speaker’s solution of the polygonal serif font might seem not needed anymore, he still did not throw it away, because later in the future when Microsoft contacted him, there was a new series of problems where they needed a core set of fonts to fact up to the problems of reading and writing, which was the coarse resolution display.

 

I could go on to talk about his story, but to me the main ideology behind this is that he never gave up, never compromised. Does creating a design solution to an issue that was already solved mean that his work was for no use? Does the limitations of technology/medium that he created at the time a compromise or simply just working around the constraints? I feel that working in constraints shouldn’t stop us as designers, rather challenge us to create more things out of the box.

 

To me, I’ve always believed in the age old saying that “a good craftsman never blames his tools”, which encourages me to find creative solutions to problems that were never that big in the first place, if you thought about it in a different angle, or maybe change your priorities when tackling a project. One of my favourite lines from this video is:

 

“Satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect, but still can be done to the best of your ability.”

 

It brings me back to a time when both my O-Level Arts and Malay Language teacher told me the same type of advice because i was more concerned about grades rather than learning, and was so afraid to fail. I was stressing out because i was also really bad at the subjects. I think that now, i have a new perception towards failing; Though it might not look pretty in my graduation script, I don’t think that it should matter now that i’m studying something creative. Instead, i should focus on my qualitative contribution as nothing is ever perfect and there is always room from improvement, and as long as you know that you’ve done the best that you could, that’s good enough.