Steve Jobs: Design's Loss

One of the design profession's true visionaries, Steve Jobs, succumbed to cancer on Oct. 5, 2011.

Through his breathtakingly innovative leadership at Apple, Jobs achieved iconic status among designers and business leaders throughout the world. His name has been mentioned alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison as a human being whose talents and ambitions combined to transform life as we know it by delivering deliciously disruptive new tools that enable us to complete both small and unimaginably large tasks more intuitively and more joyfully.

Steve Jobs understood the power of design to change the world, and he possessed the courage to demonstrate how to do it, not once, not twice, but time and again. IDSA joins the global design community in mourning his passing and celebrating his unmatched legacy.

Rather than write another lengthy (yet deserved) obituary, we have decided to gather the best of the best so that you can get the breadth of views and opinions on his contribution to the world.

Fast Company's Cliff Kuang explains how Steve Jobs discovered Jony Ive and initiated the partnership that would reshape the world of consumer electronics, the world of communications and the world itself:

[L]et's consider the greatest decision he ever made...[Fresh from a 12-year lay-off from the company he founded, Jobs' return tour to Apple] finally brought him to the workbench of a designer ready to quit after just a year on the job, languishing amid a stack of prototypes. Among them was monolithic monitor with a teardrop swoop, which managed to integrate all of a computer's guts into a single package. In that basement Jobs saw what middle managers did not. He saw the future. And almost immediately he told the designer, Jonathan Ive, that from here on out they'd be working side-by-side on a new line.

Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live, and it was Apple's great fortune that he also happened to be the company's founder.

Two passages from The New York Times' comprehensive obituary:

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

...

“‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

From The Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed products over the power of technology itself and transformed the way people interact with technology."

There are a number of great articles in the Bloomberg Businessweek Special Tribute, including this elegant slide show. 

When Jobs announced his resignation as Apple CEO, Fast Company ran a series of "The First Time I Met Steve Jobs..." stories. They range from touching to humourous to inspiring - sometimes all three.

Uday Dandavate declared, "The story of  Apple is a modern day American fairytale." He goes on to explain Jobs contribution to connecting design and business.

Wired's beautiful account of Steve Jobs' life.

Share your thoughts and tributes at rememberingsteve@apple.com