Thank You Steve

There is not a whole lot I can add to today’s blogosphere that hasn’t already been said. We will miss you Steve, and the world is richer from your contributions.

Thank you for being different. Thanks you for being easier to use. More elegant. More intuitive. Thank you for not allowing a poor product to see the light of day (ok, Newton was an idea ahead of the technology at the time), and for redoing it over and over again until it was right.

My own livelihood as a graphic designer is completely reliant on the hardware that you pioneered, and you revolutionized the design and publishing industry. You revolutionized home computing. You revolutionized the music industry. You revolutionized the cell phone industry. You revolutionized computer animation.

Since a very young age I’ve always had access or ownership of ever-more-capable Apple computers, from the early Apple II and on. It’s been a fun ride watching the technology develop and progress– to think that 20 years ago my Apple Centris 610 bosted a (seemingly huge) hard drive of 210 MB–miniscule by today’s standards–to this week’s debut of the SIRI Personal Assistant on the latest iteration of the iPhone, and iCloud launching in weeks. I will miss your keynote deliveries, and that last line that we always waited for, there’s just “one more thing…”

There is little in our world today that hasn’t been influenced in some small degree by the contributions of Apple–whether it be the products themselves or the people-centric industrial design an user-interfaces they inspired. You made the complex simple, and beautiful.

So again, Steve, thank you for going that extra mile for the rest of us. The world will miss you, but never forget you.

104 Year Old Typography Icon Lost

Ed Rondthaler, 1905-2009

Ed Rondthaler, author, inventor, philanthropist and typographic cornerstone to the 20th century advertising and graphic design industry, died last week at the age of 104.

Born in 1905 in Bethlehem, PA, and moved to Winston-Salem, NC, Rondthaler received a degree in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Drake University. He originally met his wife in the ninth grade and after marrying, they moved to New York in 1929 and Croton-On-Hudson in 1941.

Rondthaler co-invented the Rutherford Photo-Lettering machine, a photographic typesetting machine that was the technological link between hot metal and modern digital typography. It enabled designers, advertisers and printers to work with more creative hand-drawn letters whereas before they were limited to metal typefaces. Rondthaler ran the iconic NYC Photo-Lettering, Inc, founded in 1936, and authored Life with Letters, and more recently, Glimpses of 100 Years of Radical Change As Experienced By A Centenarian.

Today House Industries carries on his typographic legacy, and has posted a fantastic video of Ed commenting on the English language.