Walk to your computer, open your word-processing program, and click on the bar marked “Fonts.”
How many fonts do you find? The computer this book was first typed on contains eleven different fonts just under the letter A, from Academy Engraved to Arial Rounded MT Bold.
Of course, our escapades in fontography only start with those starting with A. You can have all those A through Z fonts in bold, italic, bold italic, underline; you can 
it, 
it, extend or condense it. You can display it in more than 164 possible sizes and an almost infinite range of colors.
This could go on, but you get the point. You no longer have something like a typewriter that prints one font, either Pica or Elite. You have a device for creating over a trillion different typefaces—just from the A typefaces alone.
If you still feel short on fonts, there’s more. Buyfonts.com promises 1,600 fonts for Windows. If you still fear that some copycat may be using your typeface and you truly want to set yourself apart, there’s an answer: Fonts.com, as of noon today, offers over 171,000 different fonts.
(If you’ve ever wondered about the force behind our world of a million fonts, it’s Lloyd Reynolds, for years a professor of art history at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In January 1973, a Reed freshman who had just dropped out after his first semester, inspired by the beautifully lettered posters on the walls throughout the southeast Portland campus, decided to audit a calligraphy course taught by Reynolds. Ten years later and inspired by Reynolds, that Reed dropout, Steve Jobs, helped design the first computer with multiple typefaces and proportionately spaced fonts: the Apple Macintosh.)
What is your computer telling you and telling all of us? We are visual animals.
We must be visual animals. The past decade’s classic no-frills, cut-to-the chase CEO, Jack Welch, left GE identified with an extraordinary focus on quality, the company that made Six Sigma famous. Yet lost in all his emphasis on the assembly line was Welch’s emphasis on design.
But then, how could any perceptive CEO miss the rise of design? Teenage boys and our thirty-eight-year-old best friends were coloring their hair; men and women were making teeth whitening one of America’s fastest-growing industries; fifty-five-year-old CFOs were adorning their bodies with tattoos; Sony’s VAIO and Apple’s candy-color iMacs, in Grape, Tangerine, Lime, and Orange, were demonstrating that a tool originally used to to crunch numbers had become a fashion accessory for millions of us.
Michael Graves had graduated from designing one of America’s first icons of postmodern architecture, the Portland Building, to designing everyday products that appear in every Target store, everywhere—followed not much later by Philippe Starck, whose greatest fame had come from designing hotels far too expensive for the typical Target shopper.
Newspapers no longer were black and white and just offering the facts. Now images in primary colors had replaced a thousand words, in primary colors.
Starbucks, our newspapers, the jaw-droppingly massive screen that sprawls most of the length of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium—design and beauty are everywhere, and people stretch to afford it; design is the value-added feature. In Chile, as one emerging example, you can scan Santiago’s crowded streets for hours before you spot a Chilean woman who does not appear to color her hair.
For men, this is relatively new. In the early 1960s, every man wore the same beige trench coat, dark gray suit, matching wool homburg hat, and patternless dark tie—think Don Draper on Mad Men. Men did not make fashion statements; they put on uniforms.
Then in rapid succession came the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war, drugs, dropping out, tie-dye, psychedelic color, and shoulder-length hair. In their wake, the uniform of The Establishment—the gray flannel suit, plain dark tie, and white shirt—was out, never to reappear. Today we are brands of one, making fashion statements that really are comments about ourselves.
Design is hard at work. And work it does, often in startling ways. If you approach someone today with a resume, for example, how will it be viewed? Can you afford to simply spew some well-thought-out words in minimally thought out Helvetica?
Let’s see.
A young man named Andrew, an excellent high school football player with dreams of receiving a college football scholarship, presented his qualifications to evaluators. Suspecting that Andrew’s style of presentation might affect the evaluator, a group of researchers presented his case in three different forms.
In the first, they typed out his statistics on a white sheet of paper.
For the second, they showed bar graphs.
For the third, they created a colorful PowerPoint presentation that included the bar graphs, but which they animated to grow and shrink during the presentation.
How good a prospect for a football scholarship was Andrew? That depended.
The evaluators who viewed his sheet of paper rated him a 4.5 of a possible 7, or 64 percent.
The evaluators who saw his bar graph presentation rated him 12 percent better, at a 5, or 71 percent.
And the evaluators who saw Andrew’s animated PowerPoint?
They gave him a 6: 86 percent. PowerPoint Andrew looked like a 33-percent better college football prospect than Plain White Paper Andrew.
Andrew’s evaluators confirm for us again: We think with our eyes. Isn’t that why Twinkies, Seagrams wine coolers, and Blue Moon beer seem to taste better today than they tasted two years ago, even though the formulas for those products haven’t changed?
(For my understanding of the ancient examples of our love of art, I am particularly grateful to Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff and her excellent book Survival of the Prettiest.)
When did we begin to love design? We started before our species started.
Even while they finished building their dwellings, fire pits, and other necessities, our ancient ancestors immediately started creating art. Some Paleolithic residents of what is now southern France painted hunting scenes in the Grotto Chauvet, the oldest cave paintings ever discovered—over 34,000 years old.
Now consider an even more remarkable discovery. In 1796 a farmer in Suffolk, England, named John Frere found several perfectly symmetrical and polished stone implements with sharp edges, which anthropologists immediately identified as hand axes. There is no practical explanation for their symmetry. If the axes’ creators wanted just a tool, they would have kept one end of the rock blunt and the other sharp, and got on with their axing. But the creators went further; they made their axes pleasing to their eyes. They made tools for art’s sake.
And they did this before our species evolved, before there was language, at a time when the tall males of their species—they were not even Homo sapiens—barely topped 4 feet tall. They did this over 400,000 years ago.
Almost as soon as we developed alphabets, we began to admire people who could draw those letters beautifully. We called this now-ancient art calligraphy, which literally means “beautiful writing.” In Tibet, to be artistic was seen as holy, and great calligraphers were treated as nobility.
Then and now, beauty looks divine to us—literally.
Might our three basic needs be for food, shelter, and beauty? Archaeologists have found sticks of red ochre over 40,000 years old in South Africa; their only possible use was for makeup. In the Ancient Egypt section of London’s British Museum, we come across a box. It’s almost 3,500 years old. In it are an ivory comb and several items from the pages of Glamour: containers of makeup.
In January 2010, archaeologists from the University of Bristol found an even older kit—an almost incomprehensibly older one. Digging in Spain, they found seashells containing lumps of a yellow foundation-type pigment and red powder mixed with a reflective black material. The powder turned out to be 50,000 years old. That meant this makeup had been used by people we long had regarded as only partly human: the Neanderthals.
Our love of beauty starts when life starts and springs up from below. Poor people first discovered and created paints, jewelry, and cosmetics. The Pueblo Indians were terribly poor and created gorgeous blankets. In impoverished rural India today you can find some of the earth’s most spectacularly dressed people, in dresses of the richest reds and other vivid hues.
Any suggestion that design is window dressing or luxury finds no support in our history. If we do not crave beauty, why do archaeologists and historians keep finding it everywhere they look?
But what is good design? What do we love?
Again, let’s go back to childhood. If someone offered you several toys, which did you pick? If someone showed you photographs of several different people, which did you stare at the longest?
Show a baby a series of photographs, and he will focus far longer on several of them. Those photographs have this in common: They are the photographs of the people whom adults consider “most attractive.”
But why do we love beauty? Is it partly because from these early years, we are told that we should?
We read Sleeping Beauty. She was the heroine of her story, a woman not merely beautiful but, by necessary implication, virtuous. Her archenemy—although Sleeping Beauty was too virtuous to hate anyone—was not merely evil but ugly. Evil and ugliness, we learned, arrive as twins.
Sleeping Beauty ultimately triumphs over ugliness and wins her reward for her happily ever after: the prince. But of course, she does not win just any prince. She wins the handsome prince.
Sleeping Beauty’s ending is a classic one, almost identical to that of the Beauty and the Beast. Readers unfamiliar with Beauty and the Beast might assume that this tale marks the exception in which the beauty overlooks the beast’s ugliness and lives happily ever after with it. In Beauty and the Beast, that is almost what happens.
In the climactic scene, Belle (the beauty) visits her family after promising the Beast she would return to him. The day of her promised return comes, but she does not, and with each minute that day, the Beast’s heartache deepens. Fortunately for the Beast, Belle wears a magic ring that allows her to see the Beast’s castle.
She looks in the ring, sees the Beast dying from his heartbreak, and races back to his castle. But she’s too late. She shudders over the Beast’s still body, then weeps. Like the ring, her tears prove magical; they revive the Beast. This being a favorite story in the Land of Optimists, America, the two live happily ever after, Belle and the Beast—don’t they?
Not exactly. Belle’s tears work such magical powers that they not only revive the Beast but transform him. He becomes what Belle deserves: a handsome prince.
Perhaps we love beauty, then, because adults for years have told us that we should.