yesterday, while my daughter was sleeping, i wrote a draft of a post about what i've been doing since the beginning of august. i never finished it (it was taking too long to write so i had to stop and clean up, eat, get ready and go to work). basically it was just a quick (ha!) summary of how my 1st floor condo flooded, i took my daughter to martha's vineyard (where i grew up) for almost a week by myself (hubby had to work), while the president was visiting (i am a very patient person), and how we're still putting the house back together after the stupid flood. yes, all very boring stuff (with lots of parentheses)...
then i found out that steve jobs died. (incidentally, my boss showed me the news on his iphone). i came home from work and was up super late scouring the internet for every article/video/twitter mention/quote i could find about him, rediscovering how brilliant he really was. now, i'm not just getting on the steve jobs/apple bandwagon just because he died - i really am genuinely bummed out that he is gone. the world has lost such an important person in design and technology. it would be odd for me not to show my appreciation and respect to someone who has had a role in creating so many things that i use on a daily basis, things that have shaped me as a person and things that have inspired me immensely. here are a few things that totally changed my life:
the mac LC-ii
OK, i'm dating myself but, i'll never forget in junior high when the computer lab at my elementary school got an LC-ii in color! how cool was super paint now! no more filling circles and squares with boring black and white bricks! yay!
pixar
toy story was funny and clever and like nothing else of it's time. it still makes me laugh. i watched the the pixar story (on starz, i think...?). that is what work should be like! it's really amazing to see the research and playing and experimenting that goes into creating even the smallest detail in a movie (like, how does something look underwater? how does something look when you're the size of an ant? how should fur move?).
itunes/ my ipod
i LOVE music and listen to it constantly. the first ipod i got was for christmas in 2005 (5th generation, 60gb, color with video). it was pretty pricey at the time at $400 but soooooo worth it since i still use it to this day. my hundreds and hundreds of CDs are all safe in storage while my 4500 + songs are all stored neatly on my computer. creating mix CDs (my specialty, love to give these as gifts) are super easy in itunes. i'm a playlist master and i've been the DJ at countless wedding showers, rehearsal dinners, wedding after-parties, etc. i may be one of the few people that will still venture out to an actual music store to buy an actual CD on the release date for certain artists. but, that itunes store is perfect for that guilty pleasure music. i mean, sometimes you just want that one britney spears song and don't want to buy the whole album, right?
i'm a mac
i'm a PC
before starting my own business, i attempted to pursue a career in advertising. it only got as far as sending out a bunch of lame resumes to companies that never gave me a second glance and i had a couple of meetings with a partner at an actual advertising firm, who was nice enough to give me advice on how to build a portfolio and then suggested i apply for an unpaid internship. i was pretty naive in thinking that my passion and eye for design and my interest in clever print ads, commercial, slogans and cool packaging would get me into SUPER competitive advertising world. without any experience. or a degree in advertising (or even a single class!). i thought that someone would just give me a chance. ha! i realized that it was pretty unrealistic for me to start a career from scratch in my late 20's, knowing that i would only have a couple of years to devote 60 hours a week to it before i would want to start a family and be home. plus, i couldn't really afford to do an unpaid internship. anyway, where am i going with this? my point is, i love advertising. i almost pursued it as a career. i still love a good ad or clever commercial. i won't fast forward my DVR during any commercial for an apple product. i've watched ads on the apple website, just to make sure i haven't missed the new "i'm a mac, i'm a PC". i saved the box from my first mac laptop for YEARS, just because the packaging was so cool, i couldn't bring myself to part with it. apple has always been the gold standard in marketing and advertising.
my iphone
i can be pretty suborn about technology and i don't really need a lot of bells and whistles. my husband is the opposite. he had to have the first iphone as soon as it came out. then upgraded to the iphone 4 as soon as that one came out. the last car we bought was one with a build-in DVD player in the back... he kept raving about the iphone and kept telling me to get one, but i resisted. i have a phone to make phone calls, i have an ipod to play music. i don't need anything fancy that does both! i finally gave in when i realized that having access to e-mail while i was out of the house with my 6 month old baby would be a HUGE time saver. plus, all those stupid apps that i used to make fun of are actually super helpful. GPS, google, itunes, i can take photos or videos and e-mail them right to my family. i don't know how i lived without it for so long! of course, i got the iphone 3 like 2 months before the iphone 4 came out (WTF?!) but that means i can totally upgrade to the 4S...
and lastly...
i'm obsessed with fonts and lettering and calligraphy. that's why i love creating invitations so much. i just love playing around with typefaces and hand-lettering and layouts. i was watching steve jobs giving the princeton commencement speech in 2005 (youtube video here). i didn't realized that he took a calligraphy class in college (after he dropped out, he "dropped in" to classes for fun) and what he learned there sparked his interest and fascination with typography and it carried over into designing the first mac computers that had multiple typefaces. no wonder i'm a mac girl! if you haven't watch his commencement speech, watch it immediately. seriously...
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary..." - Steve Jobs
No comments:
Post a Comment