Curious Findings

An exploration of curiosity – and its role in design

All our lives we hear the word in various forms – as an adjective, a noun, a verb. But what is it? Where does it come from? How does it grow?

Spurred on by a few conversations, a bit of research, and a lot of reflection – we will explore a few stories through which we’ll learn a bit about what it is, how it impacts and informs design, and how you might make it part of your own practice – if you’re curious ;)

Transcription

(Applause)

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, Marc.

It’s good to be back.

So, there’s a bunch of people here that I know and I’ve known through events and other ways over the years, and I’ve developed a bit of a reputation around web typography and that’s usually what I spend my time talking about.

So, naturally, I’m not going to talk about that at all.

This is something very new.

And it was really important to me that this be the place where I talk about it.

So, I’m going to a couple of things I want to put out there is this is brand new.

It’s the first time I’m giving this talk.

It’s the first time I’m talking about this topic specifically.

And it is motivated very personally because a lot of it was inspired by someone that you’ll see in a moment who passed away a little over a year ago.

And it was in thinking about that that kind of sparked this.

So, I’m going to talk to you about something that will feature typography.

This is all in the browser, using variable fonts and HTML and CSS.

So, there will be a few little goodies in there for people who are interested.

But this topic...

Going to wake up?

There we go.

Curiosity.

This word gets used a lot about things.

That’s a curious thing that you have there.

About someone who’s annoying you and they’re getting a little too curious.

Or I just want to figure something out.

I’m really curious about it.

And that word has been part of my lexicon and my language for a very, very long time.

And it was with the passing of my father.

He was someone who was insatiably curious.

And I use that word because it’s one that I had incorporated in my own Twitter bio, back when it was worth being on Twitter.

When it was actually Twitter.

Insatiably curious about just about everything.

And my dad wanted to learn how to play guitar so that he could play with my mom’s brother who played at all of our family get-togethers.

So, he taught himself how to play guitar.

He wanted to know how to make things.

So, he taught himself woodworking.

He taught about many things.

I taught advertising and marketing and management.

But on a trip to Japan to study corporate management styles and compare them to those in the U.S., he was learning about the people in Japan and started to become really infatuated with that society and started to create courses about the role of women in society in Japan.

His most successful courses that he ever taught.

And it was motivated out of curiosity and that passion that comes with it.

And that’s what made it, that was my dad’s most compelling content that people would just line up for to take every year.

And that was really wonderful.

And that transformation for him came 20 years into his teaching career.

So, I thought that was really interesting that the stuff that drove him the most, that he was most passionate about, when he found it, he found the audience.

So, a little bit like what Martina was talking about.

You’re putting that thing out there in the world that you want to be.

And for my dad, it was manifesting an audience in that.

And when he passed, my brother and I were thinking about it a lot.

And my brother is a philosophy professor.

And he was telling me about a course that he was teaching, his introductory course, and how he was starting to delve into these sort of intellectual virtues of philosophical virtues of things about inquiry and ethics and all these things.

And curiosity is one of those virtues.

And he wanted to explore whether or not he could teach it.

And that was really interesting to me because it was just always part of who I am.

So, I wasn’t sure how you teach that.

And so, he started telling me about how he was incorporating it in his class.

And then I started reading more about it.

And it was fascinating that curiosity was so hard to define.

And my brother had actually characterized it almost as an emotion.

And I thought that was kind of interesting.

So, I figured that I needed to really dig in a little bit more and try and understand what curiosity really is.

So, I started reading these references.

So, all the way back to Cicero in the first century BCE.

He was a Renaissance man, really, you know, a couple of 1500 years before the Renaissance.

But his explorations led him to this definition, or probably it would sound smarter if it was still in Latin.

But you could also say it’s the impulse towards better cognition.

And that was late 19th century William James, who was a philosopher and psychologist in the US.

Okay, this was better.

This is actually from a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina in the US.

And I really like this because it’s about wanting to understand something better, but not being discouraged by the fact that you don’t yet.

And that’s good.

I really like that.

This might be one of my favorite ones, though.

Paraphrasing Aristotle, an aimless, witless tendency to pry into things that don’t concern us.

So, that is just wonderful.

That is curiosity at its best.

But then there’s like all these other kinds of curiosity that we can talk about.

So, how do we use these words like intellectual curiosity?

I’ll come back to Doug Wilson in a bit.

And hopefully someday he’ll come here and talk to you about the things that he’s curious about.

He started researching the linotype machine, ended up making a film about it.

And that was how we met.

And I’ll come back to him a little bit more.

But is there too much about something that you could learn?

Probably not.

Is there too much toilet paper that one puppy could eat?

Henry’s still trying to figure that out.

And he’s a little over a year old.

That wasn’t taken that long ago.

Are there too many lambies that you could eat?

This is the shelf in our back hallway where all the good lambies go to die.

Or after they’ve died.

We have quite a collection.

It’s growing all the time.

But those are all just descriptions.

They don’t really get at what curiosity really is.

And eventually I’m going to get around to telling you why I care about it that much.

But still, this was wonderful.

This incredibly erudite academic paper that basically says, meh, we don’t know.

So the more I dug in, the less certain that definition became.

But I know it’s important.

And the reason I know it’s important is that as long as I have been aware of things, curiosity is the thing that has driven me to understand it better.

And that’s what’s going to come back as the central thing here.

So I tend to think of it this way.

It’s something that can be formed.

You may have some of it.

You may not.

You may be, as they say, naturally inclined.

Or it might be something you have to practice.

But I think I love the description when people talk about something like yoga.

They don’t say that I’m done.

That I’m good at it.

I know it now.

They call it a practice.

Because you’re never done.

You never know all the answers.

You’ve never made the perfect piece of artwork.

You are working at making something interesting or different or more effective or better the next time.

So that’s what brings it back.

And so to think about that in the context of design, I’ve got a lot of stories.

But I’m not that interesting.

So as my wife pointed out, why don’t you ask someone else?

And maybe that’ll be interesting, too.

And so I did.

I thought that maybe this project, of this being the first, I really hope that this is only the first time that I get up and talk about this.

Because I think there’s a lot more stories to tell.

I started with my friend Brian.

So I met Brian one day when I was out riding.

He was also on a ride.

And we ended up just sort of circling this boulevard together for a while.

And at the time, he was the head of the graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design, which is a very prestigious art school in Providence where I live.

And went on to be their vice president and a bunch of other stuff.

But he’s been a teacher.

He’s been a design critic.

Founded an interactive studio that was bought by Razorfish years ago.

And he’s got stories about everything.

Like a raconteur in the best possible sense.

All of my ride titles on Strava with him start with something like story time with Goldberg again.

And then launching into this ridiculous thing that he’s going to get into.

But it’s just wonderful.

There’s always something different.

It’s never an instance where something doesn’t spark an anecdote.

And then he goes down that rabbit hole.

And then three days later, he comes back with something like this.

So he was out for a walk with his wife.

I had been talking about the origins of this talk.

And he came back.

Well, how do you get past the surface?

Is curiosity just the scrolling?

How do we move past that into something of substance?

And then he said this.

But he didn’t really believe it.

It’s sort of right.

When you think about curiosity being the thing that leads you to sort of graze through all of these different things that you might learn about.

And then apply the rigor and the discipline and all of that academic stuff that drives you to really know something.

And he said, I’m not sure I really believe my own argument.

This is from somebody who, as I mentioned, has been an entrepreneur, an academic leader, a teacher, a guide.

He’s learning pottery now.

There’s nothing that he doesn’t have a story about.

Something that he learned.

So he’s full of it.

He’s curious.

So I talked to a few other people.

Eric Spiekerman, as many of you may have heard the name, is typeface designer.

He’s a typographer.

He’s a designer.

Also happens to be a cyclist.

And a tinkerer.

Just anything and everything that he wants to learn about.

And as soon as they started talking to him, it was like this.

First and foremost, this is how I would describe myself.

The most important thing about me.

And that’s one of the reasons I knew we’d get along.

And so as we talked more and more about this, he was saying, this has defined so much of him growing up, whether it’s being lectured by teachers for questioning the grammar too much because he didn’t understand it, to years of study and never getting the degree, which is very similar to me.

Doing an apprenticeship and typesetting and compositing and all these things and fast forward to today, having designed so many typefaces that are all over public infrastructure in Germany and many other places in the world.

He’s also has a press that is recreating the whole idea of what it means to letterpress print a book.

And this was another real gem.

And this defines how he works with people and who he works with.

Because if you don’t ask those questions, he’s not that interested.

So I think it sort of gets, as he put it, it gets on people’s nerves because you dig deeper and you can’t avoid gathering this knowledge.

So curiosity has been my main motivator.

And I think it’s a prerequisite to being a good designer, which is very similar to a thing that I’ve said to people for many, many years, which is curiosity is what is going to set you apart from every other designer tomorrow.

We’ll say a little bit more about that in a minute, but it is something I love about this.

If you have this natural curiosity, this is good trouble.

You’ll come by all sorts of things that you weren’t supposed to know.

And it’s just that accumulation of that knowledge, working with a client.

In this case, he was talking about branding work that he was embedded with a bank and he was there for several weeks and riding up and down in the lifts to the canteen every day, just meeting people from all walks of the company, not just sitting with the marketing people.

He started to understand that fabric and that DNA of what makes that company, that company, and really was able to bring the brand to life.

And that’s something that you don’t get from just reading the press release and taking in what they want to put out in the world.

It’s really about understanding the organization deeply.

And I was mentioning earlier about making books.

This was from the head of an organization that put on this publishing and book design events all over the world and was lamenting the lack of beautiful books.

And so they came up with a way to do it in a way that they can make a polymer plate that could do an entire signature, eight pages laid out together, and really do a proper book and actually be able to print it in an affordable way.

Once you get past the fact that they had to make a laser that can make a 50 by 70 centimeter plate.

But they did it and they figured it out.

And so there’s a level of inquisition there that is just a natural thing for him.

But a lot of the things that I described there could be applied through practice.

Now, David Jonathan Ross is another typeface designer that I’ve gotten to know over the last few years, who is wonderfully talented and has this wonderful thing.

If you haven’t seen it before, Font of the Month Club.

And for like $6 a month, US, you get, he sends out a font every single month.

And sometimes it’s an extension of a family.

Sometimes it’s something totally new.

You never really quite sure what you’re going to get.

But when I asked him about this, because this is someone that to me, curiosity oozed out of everything I ever saw from him.

But this is his response.

I’m not being intentionally curious, but I have intentionally structured my work practice to give space for that exploration.

So without using that word, he’s still absolutely embracing that concept of how do I build in this exploration, this inquiry, this time to explore and grow with something without ever actually using quite exactly that word.

So he never used it in his conversation, but it really clearly comes through.

Warbler is the typeface that’s used for almost exclusively in this presentation.

The other one is Gimlet Sands, in case you’re wondering.

Both typeface designs of his.

And Warbler started out as this display text based, more like the larger text there, and as a font of the month club release.

And then he started to expand on it and add to it.

And eventually it sort of got to the point where I really just had to have it.

So for this, I went back and I just bought the license of the whole thing.

And it has this full range of the width and weight and all of it in a variable font combined in a single file.

That’s usually what I’m ranting about up here.

But what I love about it is, you know, when Martina was talking about the high contrast or low contrast, this is it sort of in one view.

The larger size, very, very high contrast.

The smaller one automatically lessens that contrast.

The optical size is adjusted so that it stays more readable at a smaller size.

And actually having all of that built into a single file is marvelous.

It is just an incredible tool to have.

And it’s a curious thing.

And I love it.

So there were, he insists that he’s not curious, but he did the experiment that he did with Warbler was, can I use this every day, all day?

So he set up a style sheet in his web browser and it would automatically render everything in Warbler.

And he would sit there with his font design program, making changes and refreshing and making changes and refreshing just to see what would happen.

How small could he make it?

How, you know, how much could he do to really fit that brief of making something that’s really satisfying here and could still work beautifully over here?

And it’s curious.

And on client work, and this is where it’s really fascinating where you’re like, okay, we have constraints, we have the brief, we need to satisfy a particular use case.

So in this case, user interface font, typically you maybe want to be a little bit less ornamental, a little less quirky, but how far can you push it?

And so the one that’s behind there, I think that I set that up with, yes, with Gimlet Sans, which is the one that I used for very small text in the early slides.

It’s got this underbite.

So like, if you look at the way the C comes together, it sort of juts out a little bit and it’s really quirky and fun, but it doesn’t get in the way of it being readable even down to nine point.

And so that exploration of how much personality can you put into something while still having it maintain that useful quality is an interesting tension and one that many people wouldn’t bother to try.

So he uses a different word.

He uses the word wonder.

And that’s sort of, if you go back to the text from Aristotle that Philip Ball was talking about, he thought wonder was far more useful.

So it being the true root of inquiry.

And that phrase really sparked something for me because that actually was how my brother described it too.

So as a philosopher, curiosity as one of those virtues is a thing that is at the root of questioning.

And so whether you say it’s aimless and witless, or it is the origin of your knowledge, potato, patata, whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

That’s the heart of it is that it gets you to ask a question.

So, you know, and this is going to come back around eventually, I promise, to think about how you would relate this to you as a designer or you as a developer, whatever it is that you’re working on is how do you remind yourself to ask the question?

So I promised I’d come back to Doug.

Doug started this quest.

He was a trained graphic designer.

He, as part of that, took some letter press printing courses.

And then he learned about this thing called the Linotype machine.

And it kind of took over his life.

It still has, but he made this film.

He’s written all these articles, given all these talks.

Now he’s working on a book.

And he swears he’s getting to the bottom of all the things that he could research.

I don’t believe it for a second.

But I just think that this was another interesting origin where he grew up in a very conservative religious household in the Midwest, in the United States.

And he didn’t feel like it was that encouraged, even though his parents were very bright and the teachers, but they just didn’t seem to really think of curiosity as something worth encouraging or focusing on in a given way.

And he said that maybe that’s where it came from was his reaction against that as he got a little bit older.

And this I thought was really interesting because I relate to this so much that he knows that he can trust that it will lead him somewhere.

He may not know where, it may be answering a different question than when he started, but it’s going to be something interesting and worth finding out.

And so that journey, whatever it is, wherever it takes you, is what will make that worthwhile.

And trusting that is really important.

And I had to include this because I feel like when you talk about those people in your life that you know who are really inquisitive, really curious, always learning something new and always have an interesting story to tell, there’s usually a pile of books somewhere, maybe they haven’t been.

There’s a lot of books in my house that I haven’t read yet, but sometimes it’s just the comfort of it being there that I know that I can pick that up and read it is wonderful.

But yeah, there’s always new things to learn.

I just turned 54 and I’m up here telling you something that I’ve never talked about before.

And I’ve learned a lot along this journey.

So it’s a few stories from a few different really super interesting people, at least interesting to me.

So what do I think about it?

This is what I have said to designers for over 20 years, as I’ve hired them, as I’ve managed them, mentored them, interviewed them.

That’s what I want to know.

If I can see how you learn, if you can talk to me about what motivates you or how you learned the latest thing that you brought into your, your toolkit of, of things of techniques and inspiration in your work, you’re someone I want to talk to.

You’re somebody I know I can learn from because that’s really what you’re trying to do as a manager is to hire people who are smarter than you.

So that’s a key part of it is making sure that they will actually know stuff that you don’t know.

It is the most important aspect of this.

And, and so this is kind of what, what I wanted to bring this background to.

So as designers, we’ve probably done, or, or, uh, developers, engineers, but there’s lots of different, uh, folks doing different things in here.

Whatever it is, you, you studied somewhere in some way, uh, or you taught yourself stuff and, uh, and you got to this point, you’ve got this job and you’re good at it.

You’ve getting paid well.

Um, there’s, but there’s no barrier to learning more.

And that’s, I think the real key is that especially if you work in the web or digital world in any way, the one thing that you’ll know is that it’s not going to be the same thing tomorrow.

And if you’re doing exactly the same stuff and you know exactly the same stuff tomorrow and the next day and the day after you’re falling behind, someone else is going to learn a little bit more, be a little bit more motivated.

And it’s not about this being an arms race.

It’s really just simply about embracing the fact that this industry is, is one that is always fluid.

It’s always changing and always growing.

And, uh, and when I say industry, you could really substitute anything in there these days, especially with the proliferation of AI tools.

But, there’s no gate to curiosity.

And that’s what I think is so beautiful about it is anyone can become more curious.

I think I’m a pretty curious person, but I, there’s always more.

Everyone has what it takes, which is really simply ask one question, start there.

It’s really simple.

When you’re presented with some scenario, ask a question, why, and maybe ask another one.

And the more questions that you ask, the more you start to realize what you’re learning in those answers is the why.

Because if I took on face value, when the CEO said we want to be app led, that was the phrase and everybody just jumped and they said, okay, we’ve got to change everything.

It was, we’re a big e-commerce company.

Come on.

And just waiting, give it a moment.

I hope.

And if everybody just jumped at that phrase, then we wouldn’t really ever get to what it means.

And, and really the more I dug into it, the more it actually had nothing to do with whether or not we released a feature there first.

It was about whether or not our app was useful for more than just buying dog treats.

So, you know, we’re a pet e-commerce company.

It’s kind of fitting I’m on brand.

At some point, I hope the slide comes back and, what it means to me, as I learned more about this phrase, it’s I dug into it was it was all about turning our app into something that you might look at throughout the day to learn how to be a better pet parent rather than just reorder the treats.

And that’s a fundamental difference and actually is something that makes way more sense.

So we have this idea of just answer the brief, just do the thing that came out of that person’s mouth and don’t ask any more questions.

If I didn’t start asking those questions, we wouldn’t be fundamentally changing the way our, uh, our app is structured so that we’re hoping, there we go.

Thank you very much.

That, it will then turn into something that has a tab right in the bottom bar.

That’s all about learning.

We have thousands of articles that have been written by veterinarians that no one can find.

And if we bring those front and center, how much better, uh, how much more useful would this app be?

And that doesn’t take anything away from people buying the treats.

They’re still going to buy the treats, but, there’s, there’s an openness to that inquiry that allowed me to get to that understanding that I didn’t have to go to school for.

I just had to ask the question.

And when you start asking those questions and you start digging into those underlying reasons, that is when the ideation starts because that’s naturally going to prompt things to how might you then start to answer those questions.

And that in turn is what’s sparking your creativity.

So as a designer, I promised I was going to bring this back around.

We’re going to start asking more questions.

We’re going to start learning about these varied things that we might not otherwise learn about by talking to people in the lifts and getting to know people outside of marketing.

And that in turn allows us to create something that is going to be more meaningful and more connected to the people who are in that company and the people who are those customers of that company.

So, so that is how you can relate curiosity back to being a really meaningful part of what you do.

It also doesn’t have to be a huge thing.

It could be a very small thing that might end up having an outsized impact.

But, you know, when, when you need to start developing that creativity and, and this was a rut that I was in a few years ago, I decided to try, well, I’m going to go back even further.

So, uh, my Instagram feed is 15 years full of pictures of my dog walk every morning.

And the reason I started doing that was because I needed that creative prompt.

And so as a, as actually before Instagram launched and everybody was starting to post on social media about these, uh, such and such challenge, I’m going to do this thing every day.

And I think it was Doug Bowman, who’s a designer at Twitter, one of the early founders, uh, uh, founding members of the design team.

And, uh, and he was starting to post these things really frequently.

And, and so I, uh, I thought I would try that too.

And 15 years later, I still pretty much every morning we’ll post a photo trying to make some creative thing.

And, and so that’s that prompt, that habit that I’d been trying to, to work on.

And then, forward, I tried to apply that with writing.

I had written a book on web typography, felt really out of date.

I really wanted to do something new, but I didn’t have it in me to jump into writing another book.

And, uh, so I started a newsletter and said, what if I just write about one thing, one technique, one bit about hanging punctuation about link style, about, so just pick one topic, look at the history behind it, find a few images from all of those books that I have on the shelves and, and then dig into how would I do that on the web.

And I ended up doing about 50 of those and I’ve more than rewritten the book.

And it’s freely available and I see people reading it every week and that’s fantastic.

I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Um, but that sparks that, that desire for more knowledge.

And it was the act of writing it that was giving me the ideas for the next one.

And, and so that’s why I’m here, is as I started to dig into this, it got more and more interesting.

There’s more and more people to talk to.

Um, and I want that flywheel.

I love that, that reinforcement of, of looking for that new answer to this new question that I’ve found.

It’s not really bad or good.

Um, I think the, your, the word gets used, uh, depending on the perspective of the speaker as bad or good, but inherently it’s not either.

Um, and it’s also not a requirement.

I do want to state that you can be a perfectly good designer and not be curious.

You can also be a really curious designer and not be, uh, very effective.

I mean, that’s possible too.

Um, but if you practice, you’ll always grow.

And that’s really, I think what coming to things like this is all about is you come here because you, you want a little rejuvenation, you want to learn something new, you want to reconnect with friends.

And all of those things are the sparks that will turn you into somebody else tomorrow than you are today.

And it might be very subtle or it might be very profound, but it’s growth, it’s change.

It’s, uh, maybe it’s improvement.

Maybe it’s just stepping sideways.

I don’t think it really matters.

It’s just not staying in one place.

And I think that that has, uh, been something tremendously beneficial to me.

I’ve been in the web industry now for 30 years.

And I still think it’s fascinating and I still learn things every day and I still was sweating the hanging punctuation in this typography.

Been finding out that I can actually do that with one line of CSS now.

That’s pretty cool.

So it’s not bad or good.

It’s not big or little.

It’s yours.

It’s, you can do with it what you want and it’s a continuum.

It’s not any one thing.

Um, it permeates everything in your life.

I’m talking specifically about design, but there’s a whole host of other ways that it actually impacts my own life.

So by asking that question, could I understand this better?

That is how you’re opening yourself up to growth and with that growth comes agency.

So speaking with someone who’s got a tremendous amount of knowledge and is really very clearly not being valued at the place where this person works, finding that growth and that agency to take this incredible body of knowledge and find the place that does value it.

Uh, you, it’s fine to stay in a job if you’re comfortable there and if the reasons all line up, but when you want to put out into the world what you want it to be, uh, this person I’ve known for a number of years and a tremendous amount of knowledge, about design and creative things tied up into somebody who is very, very technical.

That is a rare find and there should be a million companies that want to hire this person.

So I hope that that does work and I hope this is maybe a little bit of motivation, but, that agency comes from curiosity.

It’s also ours to share and ours to, uh, to grow with.

So, as a leader or a manager, what does it do?

Um, if you are the person who is critiquing the work from your team for you, the critic, uh, that, that curiosity is, is what you want to tap into to desire that understanding of the work being done.

And when you ask those questions for the receiver of it, for the presenter, they’re getting that fresh perspective and the sort of like questioned assumptions.

And so the curiosity actually benefits both people in that, in that arrangement and it tremendously benefits the work as a driver of innovation.

So we’re going to see Brendan come up here later and, uh, and Gavin, I mean, gosh, the titles, holy cow.

So, uh, those people are curious people.

I can tell you that.

And it is a driver of innovation.

How might I make this really cool effect in the text on the screen?

How might I get it to react to the music?

Um, those questions just naturally lead people to this exploration.

So how might you do something?

Uh, it comes back to, a book I quote all the time.

Uh, I finally bought a copy.

So that’s, that’s a step in the right direction.

The art of looking sideways is something I’ve said, uh, for many, many years that I think is something that sets designers apart or creative people.

And in some fashion is the ability to make those oblique connections, to kind of look across things as you meet these people in the lift and in the canteen.

And you put these things together that, uh, someone who is focused solely in one lane doing one job function would never do.

And that I think is a hallmark of true creativity is, is to be able to have all these conversations and they kind of percolate in your mind and, and then they start to pop up in your sketch, in your, in your solution, in your code.

And, and that’s where the innovation really happens.

When is it done?

For some people.

And this was, uh, what came of one of those papers that I found about creativity was the idea of creativity, has two faces and there’s two kinds of curiosity.

There’s the curiosity of someone who simply sees something, doesn’t understand it and says, that’s fascinating.

I would love to understand this better.

And there’s a, this just drive to just figure it out.

And, and that I think is, is a great kind of curiosity.

And then there’s this other sort that is simply filling a gap.

Oh, I don’t know about this thing.

So I’m going to learn this thing and then, and then it stops.

And, and that I think is a shame because you’ve only really realized half the benefit.

You gained that little bit of knowledge and I’m not really, you know, if you don’t do anything with it, then not sure you’re really gaining anything, at that point.

And that’s, that’s unfortunate.

So for me, it’s, the creativity part, uh, the curiosity part is never done.

There’s always another question to ask.

There’s always something that I might redo and redo a little bit better.

But it is that journey and that exploration that really sets it apart and turns it into something that’s a motivator for me every day.

Um, I don’t know everything about making a perfect cup of coffee, but I have been filtering the water and gathering other things and me getting a better grinder.

And, it might not be perfect, but our mornings are getting better and better because our coffee is really, really good.

I may not know how to typeset the perfect page of every text for every person in every condition, but the more I work on it, the better it gets.

And the more I share it, then the more other people are going to typeset better text for more people and it will be more accessible and, uh, and more readable and more beautiful.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

That’s never done either.

And I know that I may never give the perfect conference talk, but I do know that this one will be better tomorrow for having given it today.

So thank you very much.

(Applause)