For most designers, Steve Jobs is a hero and inspiration, especially those of us in the user experience field who strive for simplicity and cleanliness in designs. I’ve just watched the video of his Stanford speech (i’ve included it below) where he talks about how he gave up college to instead study the things he loved, to follow his heart and intuition. It feels rather surreal that our new social network that we’ve been working on since being made redundant a couple of yrs ago is now launched. In fact we took the brakes off it at about midnight last night. This morning we realised the news of Steve must have come very shortly after.

Today feels rather bitter sweet. We’re really excited to finally launch sqoshi but incredibly sad that the most inspirational person of our work is no longer here. I like to think he’d have been proud that we decided to escape the rat race and create something we were passionate about. I can’t imagine he’ll be resting where he is, instead he’ll be looking over all our shoulders, he’ll be that voice in your head asking ‘why have you still got that feature in there? remove it!’ or ‘what are you doing in this job? follow your passions and just do it!’ He will continue to influence all of us for the better.

We hope he loves what we’ve done. He’ll always be our hero and a massive inspiration to us.