I taught graphic design at San Jose City College for seven years (1973-1980) while I was earning my BA from San Jose State. The course was called "Lettering and Layout" and was essentially beginning Graphic Design. The Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities had been a showcard letterer in his youth, and he was passionate about lettering. He understood that the essence of good graphic design was typography, and he was looking for someone who shared his zeal for lettering. He was impressed with my calligraphy, and hired me to teach freehand lettering, which in the 70's was actually still an occupation.

These days typography is largely computerized, of course, but hand lettering is still considered an art, as well as academic preparation for a career in graphic design. I began the course with a unit of Calligraphy, that is, freehand lettering with the broad pen, and soon developed a reputation as a calligraphy teacher. Although I focused on Western calligraphy, I included a high regard for the scripts of other cultures, and found that my Japanese and Chinese students were eager and adept brush letterers, and my Arabic and Hebrew students had a flair for the broad pen. I encouraged their enthusiasm, and consequently had students who appeared to reinvent themselves based upon calligraphy. It is my contention that calligraphy has a healing and therapeutic effect by connecting the self with the history of writing, regardless of which alphabet and culture. See The Alphabet and the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain.

The beginning of writing goes back to the first cave paintings, beyond the scope of this website, but I'm sure you can Google it and learn more. University courses in lettering start with the development of the alphabet, so I included a bit of this history in my course. Epigraphy, or the study of ancient writing systems, has been around for centuries, for as long as the history of the alphabet. The Roman alphabet still takes its name from the Roman civilization, and Italic is a nod to the Italian influence of the Renaissance.

The course curriculum mostly covered fonts, also called type faces (also called fonts after the "fountain" pen) which had all evolved out of the historic calligraphic hands. Typography is the study of modern fonts. See Wikipedia for an introduction to fonts and typography. Wikipedia

In the layout part of the course, I gave my students the choice of using calligraphy or typefaces to do a layout assignment. To keep a sense of real world relevance, I asked them to choose an existing advertisement from the yellow pages, and improve upon it using the design principles we studied. The content could be kept exactly the same, but improved upon as far as layout and graphic style goes. The finished product was the first of the several portfolio pieces produced in the course.

Years later, I would learn to do the same calligraphy with a pen tool in Photoshop and Illustrator, and to created page layouts in Quark and InDesign. The principles of good design never change.

In addition to teaching, I also worked for a number of design firms in that time period, where I "practiced what I preached." At one of these design firms, I was a fulltime calligrapher for a company called The New Scribes, where I hand-lettered menus, certificates, wedding invitations, and the like. The owner of the firm had been a calligrapher at the Marin Renaissance Fair, and worked in Renaissance costumes. I asked her to come to my class at City College to talk about calligraphy, and she ended up hiring me as one of her fulltime calligraphers. A couple of my best students also worked for her. It jump-started their budding careers in graphic design.

The New Scribes was my introduction to professional calligraphy, but I knew that there was much more to graphic design, especially if I wanted to make a living. I went to work for a typographic design firm called Henry Kappelhoff's, a small marketing agency that serviced San Jose business community for decades. Old Mr. Kappelhoff's father had been a type-setter in Holland, and instilled in Henry a reverence for fonts. He was also a very accomplished painter, but like many fine artists he made a living as a designer. He taught me the basics of layout, and how to cut a perfect mechanical overlay in amberlith for photolithography. Even before Photoshop, we still had to design in layers.

Virtually all of the principles of design and layout that I learned early on in my graphic design education have been carried into the computer and browser worlds. The same fonts we used in typography 40 years ago are still used on the web. Serif and sans-serif are common descriptive terms relating to the formation of fonts. Page layout, even for the web, is still essentially the same. I never feel that any of my past experience is irrelevant.