Dylan Roscover Finds the Right Words
Dylan Roscover, a commercial artist from Boulder, Colorado,
used the words from the 1997 Apple slogan “Here’s to the
crazy ones” to create a portrait of Steve Jobs, an embodiment
of the genius misfit.
This slogan was part of Apple’s “Think Different”
ad campaign, which included a commercial showing
black-and-white footage of some of the most innovative
thinkers of the 20th century. One version of the com-
mercial was narrated by Jobs and included this quote:
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels,
the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square
holes … the ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules…. You can quote them,
disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the
only thing you can’t do is ignore them, because
they change things. They push the human race
forward, and while some may see them as the
crazy ones, we see genius, because the people
who are crazy enough to think that they can
change the world are the ones who do.”
Artists all over the world have felt moved to use their own
rebel talents to pay tribute to the late Apple founder, but
Roscover felt inspired long before Jobs’s death. In 2009, the
self-described Mac fanboy created a picture of Jobs using
typeface and fonts familiar to fans of Apple’s products.
Even Jobs’s whiskers were comprised of lowercase
Ls in Apple Garamond, a font the company designed and
began using after the release of the 1984 Macintosh. In this
portrait, Roscover uses text from the “Crazy Ones” campaign
to contour Jobs’s face in different point sizes while empha-
sizing certain words like misfits, rebels, and troublemakers.
Traveling down the length of his nose is the subject’s full
name, Steven Paul Jobs.
“The Steve Jobs piece was meaningful to me,” said
Roscover, whose commercial and editorial clients include
Adobe, The Jackson Laboratory, and Time and Stern maga-
zines. “I loved the campaign to begin with, and Apple is
rewriting the way the world works. Folks like Steve Jobs just
had a drive that was crazy with an insane attention to detail
and an obsession to get something right.”
Roscover could have easily been talking about himself
and the typeface portraits he creates. He has lost count of
the number of pieces he has done working with type, but
he believes it to be between 50 and 100. Each can take
two or more weeks to complete, starting with research
to understand the subject and ending with the finished
piece, created using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Roscover, who was attending art and design school
in Florida when he created the Jobs piece, went three days
without eating or sleeping to obsessively place each word
on the face of his subject. “It’s about finding the right fit,”
Roscover said. “It’s like pairing wine with meals. You’re trying
to find tastes that work with other tastes. The work is really
challenging, but when you get it right, it is fun to look at.”
Roscover’s highest-profile pieces include a portrait
of Venus de Milo for Adobe called The Birth of Type and
two different typeface illustrations of President Barack
Obama, one of which was a cover image for Time magazine.
Roscover did not copyright the Jobs image because he
wanted to share it with the world. Not long after he made the
portrait public, a member of the creative team for the “Think
Different” campaign contacted the artist to say how much he
liked the portrait. In fact, he’d passed it along to the man him-
self, and the thought of Jobs seeing it was reward enough for
Roscover.
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