As a kid my vision of the future was all about technology. Technology that was clean, slick and easy for everyone to use. Fast forward to the mid-nineties, it wasn’t exactly what I had imagined, the technology was there but it was far from clean, slick or easy to use, you can only imagine my disappointment.

I started using computers for design in 1997, before that I had only used a few PC’s and an old Commodore 64 to play games on but I was never a big gamer. So my introduction to a computer for work was when I started art college. Mac’s seemed to be what designers (and only designers) were using at the time, I didn’t know any better so I jumped into Mac OS 8, yikes!

I bought my first Mac in 1998, it was a ugly beige box, I wasn’t that excited about it, sure it would make my college work easier but it was a bit like buying an expensive sketch pad, just another tool.

3 months later I read an article that Apple had just released a strange looking ‘all in one’ PC that wasn’t a beige box and the image of the product sparked something in my head. This was a piece of industrial design that fitted into my childhood vision of the future, I wanted one but it was too late, the beige box had been purchased and was sitting in my bedroom. Anyway, the iMac just looked good, the operating system Mac’s were shipped with at the time was far from elegant, it didn’t look good and was hard to use so why dress it up with with cool looking wrapping paper. You can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig.

Just a year or two later Apple released OS X, this changed everything for me, working in OS X made me feel like I lived in the future I had dreamt of, it worked, looked amazing and was fun to work on, this was something my mates who all used PC’s never understood and still don’t. Using a UI should be an expierience that you enjoy, I have never enjoyed working on Windows. I remember reading up about Apple at the time and about how the co-founder Steve Jobs had returned to the company after being fired from Apple 11 years previously, the products that rolled out from the first iMac in 1997 to the iPad in 2010 were all part of his master plan and vision for where technology needed to be in the future, he fused technology with design and created a future that I have a huge amount of passion for.

The merging of design and technology excites me, without design I would have had no interest in technology and I think that without technology I wouldn’t have as much interest in design. Steve Jobs and Apple have given me a huge respect for simplicity, something I strive for everyday in how I design, work and even communicate. Simple is harder than complex.

I don’t think people will ever understand the profound effect Steve Jobs has had on design and technology both now and forever. Through simplicity and design he put technology into the hands of millions, not just with Apple products but the influence Apple products have had on the whole technology industry. I had a Nokia smart phone in 2006 that had the same features as my first iPhone, I didn’t use any of the ‘smart’ features on my Nokia because I would have spent days with my head in a manual. It may all sound a bit fluffy but a lot of people would not be using the technology that is around today if it wasn’t simple and elegant and I put that down to Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs will be missed by geeks, designers and even people who didn’t even know who he was because he changed design and technology forever by marrying them together.

RIP. Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011