I had a pretty conventional weeknote all ginned up and ready to go, but I don’t think we’re going to go with that today. It seems a little beside the point, given events. We’ll use this space, instead, to thank Steve Jobs for everything he gave us in his 56 years on the planet.

We know that nothing we offer here will be counted among the more eloquent or insightful or resonant of the hundreds of thousands of words that are bound to be devoted to Steve’s memory over the next days and weeks. But I can’t imagine many other news events capable of bringing work in the studio to an utter, sudden, silent halt the way the news did yesterday — certainly, I daresay, there are very, very few individuals whose passing would have affected us so. So neither can I imagine not acknowledging his loss in some way.

As I am far from the only person to note, it’s odd to think about reacting this way to the loss of a CEO… a businessman, of all things. But while I know there are a fair number of people in the world who think primarily of Steven P. Jobs as a long-term generator of shareholder value, and his life as one long HBR case study, those people are missing the point entirely.

The significance of Steve’s work was the giddy trickle of adrenal glee that (for me, anyway) signalled and accompanied his every appearance on stage. This was about so much more than hucksterism, spectacle or showmanship. It happened because every time Steve unveiled a new Apple product, he was demonstrating in the most concrete possible way that while it would certainly depend on powerful, and powerfully opaque, technologies, the future itself could be — and might even turn out to be — recognizably human.

Maybe still more important, for a working designer, was the sheer hope he instilled in our hearts every time he did this. Apple’s output in the Jobs era was existence proof that someone could actually thread the impossible rapids of the contemporary development process, and deliver to the world something that was at one and the same time effortlessly useful, uncompromisingly beautiful, and sufficiently desirable to dominate its market.

Let’s not for a single moment downplay the magnitude of this feat. What Apple accomplished was nothing less than squaring the circle of High Modernism, producing clean, rational, elegant design that nevertheless appealed to the mass audience in a way Modernist design ostensibly does not and cannot. (That they were able to achieve this consistently, for over a decade, is something I myself still cannot quite fathom.)

And while I’m surely sympathetic with those who single out Apple’s “Think Different” campaign as an offensive high-water mark in the commodification and corporate recuperation of human bravery, I can’t in my heart of hearts quite bring myself to join them. I know perfectly well that I never needed Apple’s, or anyone’s, permission to be myself, to live by my own lights and to act in the world in the ways I believed the world required of me. But what still happens, to this day, every time I lay eyes on one of those billboards? That trickle of glee again, reminding me of the heroic feats human beings are capable of if they remain unswervingly true to themselves. I cannot think that is ever, under any circumstances, a bad thing to meditate on. If nothing else, it’s the first and only time in my life I’ve ever been truly inspired by an advertising campaign, and that, trust me, is its own kind of impressive accomplishment.

I’ll leave it to others to dissect whatever hypocrisies Steve committed, to discuss his failings, moments of shortsightedness, blindspots. I couldn’t care less about them, to be honest. How could I, when I personally owe him so much? Literally just about every word I’ve ever written for publication has been on an Apple keyboard, to scratch the barest surface. And though I would never, ever dare to compare the two enterprises, there’s never been any question in my mind that it was Apple that carved out the safe space in which a shop like Urbanscale can operate, can speak unabashedly about beauty.

So thank you, Steve. Thank you for everything you did, everything you made, everyone you inspired and everything that inspiration has made possible. I, and every single thing I ever set my hand to, will always carry a little of that glee inside of us. If we are very, very lucky and work very, very hard, maybe we’ll get to share it with the world in a way that touches a fraction of the number of people you did.