‘What you share with the world is what it keeps of you,

A man who understood how integral design is to how we experience and engage with a product. The need to simplify our chaotic lives in every way possible, launching products without manuals, having only one button controlling everything and employing basic human instincts into the core of the product.

That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex (Jobs)

His keen eye on all the smaller things is one of the reasons why Apple is the most successful company in the world today.

As soon as we see the all-important ‘i’ in font of a word, we immediately associate it with Apple, iPhone, iPad, iPod, the list goes on and on. The obvious assumption would be that Apple has trademarked its famous ‘i’ but no, there was never any need. Apple’s convincing marketing has reassured us that any word or product with that vowel is related to the company. The thought of even copying it is rather stupid. This little letter is the tenth most used word in the English language and our favorite pronoun. So, why did Apple find the need to use it? The answer is obvious. We as consumers associate with it so well because we feel that this technology belongs to us and was made just for us. Genius wouldn’t you say?

Jobs stated that:

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

The Apple Logo is a testament to his clear vision, a sleek and elegant representation of the company. First multi-coloured but now modernized by making it monochromatic, smooth lined, including zero text and above all else a symbol of pop culture. It was designed to portray a lust for knowledge and incase you manage to confuse an apple and a tomato, Rob Janoff, designer of the logo, included the bite.

Serif, sans-serif, kerning – gibberish to most folk but another reason why Jobs was so unique, he actually knew the difference between typefaces and what all this type terminology meant. After dropping out of college, Jobs continued to go to the classes he was interested in and one of those was Calligraphy. If he hadn’t, we might be sitting at our computers with only boring Times New Roman to use. Jobs’s motto of ‘staying hungry, staying foolish’ has allowed us to express ourselves better in this digital age.

The creative community has been altered due to Jobs’ impact. His part ownership of Pixar Animation brought us the first computer animated feature, Toy Story. Artists like David Hockney use the artistic apps on the iPhone and iPad to create their work. He comments that ‘ it is a great drawing instrument, marvellous range of marks, if you get into it. Very subtle colour you can get, probably for an amateur it can be a bit too complicated but you’ve got a dozen different brushes on it and remember, the iPad drawing, you can always go back to them.’ Apple offers so many advantages where art and music are concerned. Outcomes that aren’t easily achieved on a PC as the technology just isn’t geared in that way.
 

Just under a year ago we featured the wonderful ad campaign for The Zimbabwean by TBWA Hunt Lascaris Johannesburg, a campaign that highlighted the worth of the Zimbabwean dollar bill by using it to create actual billboards, posters and other outdoor advertising, as a meme representative of Zimbabwe’s plummeting socio-economic circumstances. This year, the same agency has been asked to create another campaign for the newspaper, and once again, they have done themselves, The Zimbabwean and the country’s people proud.

Named The Voiceless Campaign, it pays tribute to the tenet of the Zimbabwean: to give a voice to the voiceless. The posters feature the work of photojournalists working in Zimbabwe over the last two years, many of which were banned by Mugabe and the ZANU-PF regime after police raided an exhibition in Harare as it opened. The photojournalists donated their work to the campaign in an effort to prevent their work from being silenced. The images direct people to the Zimbabwean website, where the context of each image is explained by written accounts by the photojournalists and located on a satellite map.

Here’s a video explaining the campaign.

For those who missed it, here’s the article on last year’s campaign, courtesy of onesmallseed.net:

This is a really smart advertising campaign by TBWA/Hunt Lascaris for a small Zimbabwean newspaper (The Zimbabwean). Quipped ‘The World’s first Trillion Dollar advertising campaign’, it draws on that oft-repeated gibe that it’s cheaper to use Zim dollars as toilet paper these days. I saw the ad recently on a billboard at JHB airport and it really is an ad printed on money that has been carefully woven together like tapestry.

A work of art in itself, it is poignant and so very pertinent. I imagine the ad would be illegal in Zimbabwe and so it really speaks volumes to the power of media in facilitating free speech in the face of suppressive regimes that sadly have much of the continent in a stranglehold.

The ad serves to help create awareness and support of the Zimbabwean newspaper which has been a voice in the wilderness for Zimbabwean exiles for the past 3½ years. As described by the newspaper, ‘One of the most eloquent symbols of Zimbabwe’s collapse is the Z$100 trillion dollar note, a symptom of its world record inflation. This note cannot buy anything, not even a loaf of bread and certainly not any advertising, but it can become the advertising – a powerful reminder about Zimbabwe’s plight and the need to hold someone accountable.’

The campaign was also run in downtown Johannesburg and includes posters, flyers, and billboards all using Zimbabwe currency.