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| (From the home page at Apple.com) |
Why do I say Mr Jobs gave me my career?
In the 90's my career as an illustrator was roaring along with a painting style. Clients were constantly calling and my agent couldn't be happier. I was painting and collaging to my heart's desire. Then something happened.
The work hit a creative ceiling. My painting had gone as far as it could go. Art became a chore.
I started playing around with the Mac and the intuitiveness made experimenting fun. The technology kept improving which made it easier for creatives. Frankly, I was lazy when it came to painting. Once a path was decided in painting, that was it. It was too much work to backtrack and try a different idea. The Mac freed me from this excuse. Experimenting with options and compositions were a click away. You could save multiple versions of the same image. It was like a visual diary of your process. The work broke through a ceiling.
I remember when Jobs was forced out of Apple the first time. They were getting hammered in the marketplace. A string of execs started sucking the life out of a Mac. All the Apples were ugly beige boxes with an operating system that was getting dated. It looked like Apple was going to go out of business.
My illustrator friends and I were freaking out. If Apple went out of business, we were going to have to use Windows which were clunky for creating art. I told my friends eff it. If Apple dies, I'm giving up digital art and going back to painting.
Then Jobs came back.
Man did he come back. He made Jonathan Ive head of design. First those ugly beige boxes were replaced by colorful plastic machines that had a retro future thing going on. Next came the minimal design which looked like works of art in your studio. The operating system developed from Job's time at NeXT was genius. I remember when the first cinema display shipped. Receiving it was like Christmas Day for the first time and I couldn't stop staring at it. It looked like the effing future. It was FUN AS HELL to create art on an Apple.
The other day I heard from an art director I've worked with for years. She said she really likes how the work has grown since the 90's.
Thanks Mr Jobs.
Couldn't have done it without you.
You will be missed.
7 comments:
Appreciate your post; your work inspires me. And so does the life of Steve Jobs. His contribution to human creativity has improved so many lives.
Well put James, well put. In addition to the innovations that he and his team are responsible for I have to thank him for simply being inspiring—to never settle, to trust your intuition, to take the best of human endeavors and apply them to your area, to simplifying the complex. The list goes on. But simply put, he was one of the most inspiring human beings on the planet in our time, and for that, I thank him and will miss him.
Our retouchers feel the same way, truly would not be possible to do what we do on a P.C and no where near half as fun.
the world is a worse and less interesting place without him, but lets not forget the closed architecture, overpriced and underpowered machines and woeful support for cgi applications. What is most amazing about Jobs is the marketing buzz he managed to create, with fanboys and girls clamouring to spend their money on exactly the same product as they already have but with a few of the bugs sorted out.
Anonymous,
Thanks for the thoughts.
If you will forgive me, I would like to suggest you might be looking at Jobs' through the eyes of an engineer which would make you miss the genius of Jobs and technology. There is a reason many companies had similar products before Apple and got crushed when Apple when entered a marketplace.
Jobs and Apple understood how people want to interact with technology.
It is not an engineering thing or a math thing.
It is an art thing.
Creatives everywhere know what I'm talking about.
As Jobs said, the best innovations marry art and science.
Exactly. Although Windows could and can technically do everything a Mac does, it's just 'not fun'. Having 'not fun' is terrifying to an artist and like James I had plans to go back to painting if Apple died.
It's about the computer getting out of the way and letting me create. What would Guernica be like if in the middle of painting, Picasso is prompted for a string of mind-numbing updates before he uses his next brush?
Many companies (Adobe) need to get better at getting out of the way and follow Apples lead of making computers serve humans.
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