Where’s the ON switch?

There are important moments in your life that you look back on and you can instantly realize the impact that that moment had.

In 1988 I was working at my first job as a designer, my desk was covered with dozens of tools that I needed in order to do my job. Items that could make up a great museum display in 2011; Letraset sheets, Pantone books, Rapidograph pens, blue pencils, straight edges, triangles and french curves as well as a darkroom filled with toxic chemicals and a process camera the size of a small car.

In order to set a page of text we had to measure the space and then do math (yes math) to calculate how much copy could fit depending on the font style, font size and leading. I’m shaking my head just thinking about it.

But then one day everything changed.

I took a new job at a small Halifax ad agency where a friend John had been working for a few months. I arrived for my first day of work with my portfolio case filled with the tools of my trade and headed to my desk. On that desk was a boxy beige Mac Plus. My only previous experience on a computer was an awkward half hour on an Apple II at college (no one knew how to use it) and a few hours playing games on my younger brother’s Commodore64.

I remember sitting and staring at the tiny 9″ screen, the big clunky keyboard and brick-sized mouse and wondering what the heck I had gotten myself into. “So, where’s the ‘on’ switch,” I asked John. He reached around the back and switched it on. ‘Welcome to MacIntosh’ appeared on the screen after a few seconds and from that point on everything changed.

The ‘tools’ of my trade were gradually replaced by the Mac and its software. We had two packages to work with Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand, 2MB of RAM (whatever that was) and three fonts; Times New Roman, Helvetica and Brush Script.

I was aware at that time that the two founders of Apple were no longer there, Steve Jobs had left in 1986 and Steve Wozniak had left in 1987. But I was keenly aware of the contributions both had made to the device that I was now using to pay the bills. As the years went on, Macs became more and more powerful and could do even more of the heavy design work with tools like Photoshop, Quark and Illustrator.

Thank You, Steve Jobs

In 1996, the World Wide Web was going mainstream and Jobs returned to Apple. Two years later he introduced the iMac. While it wasn’t robust enough for my needs, I recognized the attention to design. It was beautiful, compact and came in five translucent color cases. Suddenly Apple wasn’t just the design geek’s tool, everybody wanted an iMac.

But we all know the Steve Jobs-led Apple didn’t stop there. In November the iPod was unveiled, in 2007 the iPhone and in 2010 the iPad.

I didn’t know Steve Jobs, but I knew that whenever I saw the guy in the back turtleneck and jeans take the stage that it was likely that some aspect of my life was in for a fundamental change. There is barely a moment during the day when one of the devices created under Jobs’ leadership is not within arm’s reach.

Thanks Steve.

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