October 6th, 2011 bySteve Jobs has been an incredible influential individual to our lives, and especially to our jobs. Thanks to his vision and his drive he made people love, and be proud of, something that before was grey and hidden under our desks.
As designers we should be very grateful for having witnessed such a remarkable story which ultimately made our job more exciting.
The industry, us included, will miss you. Good bye Steve!
Canonical Design Team
The toolkit
11 Responseshide comments
I have been personally, and instinctively, slightly adverse to all these thank yous appeared on the web today. Steve was indeed an incredible entrepreneur, who managed to creates a religion out of a business. But this surely was so remarkably beneficial only to his followers, and of course Apple share holders.
But the reality is that also we, as software designers, should be very grateful to what Steve has done to the world, especially to our industry. For us, discussions and lateral thinking are fundamental forms of inspiration, and who else, with that power, has been so bold with his unpredictable decisions, always made looking forwards, no backwards?
Other reason why Steve has been a truly inspiration for us is for his maniac care to design. This is critical to successfully follow and stay coherent to a vision, which is often defined by the very small details.
If you are a designer and you are not sure if Steve did something for you, then think again and ask yourself if you were doing this job, or if you would have loved it so much, if 56 years ago this remarkable story didn’t begin.
Steve Jobs also had a great influence on child labor and slavery in the Congo and on Chinese workers forced to inhumane working conditions in factories Foxconn’s suicide.
Hi Marco, I guess you are not using any product from any of Foxconn’s clients, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
Adding a slightly romantic take on an obituary (views are mine)
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Remembering Steve Jobs
”Power and sex!” Those were the words with which Steve Jobs introduced the first Powerbook made out of titanium in 2001. That was just the beginning of his second coming. Before that he had already rolled out Macintosh, NeXT and Pixar.
Jobs was a controversial personality, but one thing is certain – by instilling his charisma to make his products sexy, he reclaimed technology from the hands of technocrats.
Also, despite being neither designer nor engineer, Jobs excelled as the ”ultimate end-user”. Henry Ford once claimed “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Steve Jobs never asked for faster horses, or cars for that matter – he demanded his personal jetpack.
In his last outing as Apple’s CEO he attributed the company’s success to the polygamous marriage of technology, liberal arts, and humanities. No mention of business, growth or profits there, yet this oblique approach yielded massive success.
One more thing… What really ought to resonate within the design and tech community left behind is Jobs’ ability to articulate advanced concepts in a very inclusive way. One of the best examples of this was when he said ”Computer is the equivalent of bicycle for our minds”. And this was inspired by a scientific article on energy-efficiency of condors, humans and humans on bicycles. Thinking different is a polygamous affair indeed.
Just think, without Steve’s influence the Cannonical design team would have had to copy someone else’s desktop design.
@Duncan, since now we might struggle to have enough source for our copying, will you be able to start sharing your inspiring design? That would be very appreciated, thanks!
Well said!
I’d be happy to submit design ideas to the Ubuntu project if I were allowed to retain my rights to the contributions.
And what rights would those be? Copy rights? Design patients? Be clear about what you’re talking about since this is design we’re talking about and not code creation.
In all fairness, when it comes to design there is hardly any natural rights anyway. You could provide inspiration in some work you do and some other design could make something out of it.
Duncan: the biggest reward currency in free software is kudos; that stops working if the originators’ names are not attached to something.
Copyright as it stands now basically states that you can’t do anything with somebody else’s work. To take a licence such as the GNU GPL, the copyright holder gives the permission for others to distribution their work, but only under certain conditions. Examples are normally along the lines of “you and any others that in-turn received this work may distribute it as long as certain conditions are observed”… (for example, one might lose the permission if starting legal action against the owner).
As Martin notes, it would be useful if you could give a specific indication of what rights you’re referring to. Copyright, Patents, Design rights, Trademarks, Database rights, … are all different things intended for different purposes and mixing them up doesn’t help.
Great mans don miss us, but we miss them!
We miss Steve Jobs! as ubuntu User ! but miss him!
Tnx Steve Jobs for your all great ideas.
i never use nay of your product but i need to say you Tnx!