Steve Jobs has retired from his throne. A seat at the head of an engineering company who became the most valuable emporium with a designer as a king, as opposed to say… a software company with a royal engineer.
As a practicing designer this brings me mixed feelings, considering that this is the man who has powered perfection and has been rumored to obsess about every typefont, ligature, color and hue value that goes out for production, not to mention the millions of mock ups he approves and rejects, possibly explaining why Jonathan Ive is not always smiling.
Steve Job is arguably the invisible hand of creation and creativity; a gestalt for many designers, artist and the creative types who have spent many fruitful laborious hours in the pursuit of a more aesthetically pleasing world, by choice.
This is the man who has embodied taste, perfection, individuality, championing the ethos of not good design, but brilliant design. In the world where people could possibly slack off, make do with, and compromise, Steve embodies the word bothers, and bothered. Design is really just that, when you are angered by something that is not harmoniously assembled, and which does not bring a timeless ambiance for a user in his experience, then, design is not achieved.
Twist and turn the word design for all you like, in this state of flux, abstract and conceptual, process oriented projects, never has Design been more critical than what is produced before your eyes, and in your hands.
Tangibility is what Steve embodies, intangibility is what he manifests.
Cheers to the man who have mustered and expound his ideologies in sprinkling the world with sensational objects and delectable softwares, we owe it to you for the creation of this happily creating economy, you’ve made my working life a little more bearable and a tad more inspiring. For I cannot imagine myself spending a good half of my life in front of something which you would not have a second thought of calling it, ugly.
‘Focusing is about saying no.. ‘, re WWDC 97.
Critical practice, this is of course subject to taste. We’ll put our faith in Tim Cook, have a good retirement Steve.
