I'm Greg Moore,
a graphic designer striving to create things people care about.

My first Apple com­puter was a gift from my mother in 1988. It was an orig­i­nal Macintosh that Northwestern University had loaned her and she decided to bring it home.

I hogged the thing, play­ing the mouse tuto­r­ial so many times that my par­ents even­tu­ally moved it into my bed­room and dubbed it my com­puter. I still have vivid mem­o­ries of the hours I spent in MacPaint, draw­ing my own Super Mario Brothers lev­els. I would later bring up those mem­o­ries in repeated argu­ments with teach­ers over them try­ing to con­vince me that draw­ing in LOGOS was “fun.”

Sadly, because of Apple’s mis­steps in the edu­ca­tion mar­ket through­out the early 90’s, I didn’t really get to do much more with Macs until Steve Jobs came back and intro­duced the iMac. I was on vaca­tion with col­lege friends in the Little Italy sec­tion of Toronto, Canada when we walked by a com­puter store with some of the first ads. “What is that?!” I blurted out, stop­ping dead in my tracks. The iMac ads were on mul­ti­ple, huge, full color vinyl ban­ners that clearly showed off every translu­cent detail. Pure sugar to a visual per­son like me. My gawk­ing nearly caused us to miss our trolly but the images stuck with me longer than my friends com­plaints. We had just seen the future and I was the only one who seemed to care.
It’s hard to relate just how rad­i­cal the iMac was at the time. Until then, grey, util­i­tar­ian boxes dom­i­nated the com­put­ing world and were some­thing you hid under your desk. Not the iMac. The iMac was the first com­puter I had ever seen that dared to use color. Not only color but trans­par­ent color. It was so well thought out that they even dared to show you the inside! To a com­puter nerd study­ing fine arts, the whole thing was a ver­i­ta­ble orgy of form and func­tion that begged you to touch it. When my col­lege got a com­puter lab full of the col­or­ful guys, I spent almost as much time ogling them as I did edit­ing video with them.

From that day in 1998, it’s been a series of sim­i­larly amaz­ing Steve Jobs orches­trated prod­ucts. I saw the live keynote when Steve intro­duced the first iPod, the Titanium PowerBook G4, the iPhone, and the iPad. The prod­ucts that Steve made pos­si­ble have, and con­tinue to be, so inte­grally woven into my pro­fes­sional and per­sonal life that I can’t imag­ine my world with­out them. If I could have spo­ken to him before this sad day, I would have said

“Thank you Steve for mak­ing the most impor­tant prod­ucts I’ve owned:

• Your prod­ucts helped me com­plete my col­lege degree after my PC destroyed itself ren­der­ing video.
• Your prod­ucts made my work portable and allowed me to show­case it to land my first job.
• Your prod­ucts are the recorders and dis­trib­uters of my fam­ily videos and photos.
• Your prod­ucts are my daughter’s first expe­ri­ence with computers.
• Your prod­ucts are the reli­able tools I use on a daily basis to pro­vide for my family.

Thank you Steve. You will be greatly missed.