Steve Jobs

The line most people arrive with — stay hungry, stay foolish — came from a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005, framed as a case for curiosity and resilience. By then he had already spent decades turning product launches into something closer to theatre, and his keynotes were watched as cultural events rather than corporate announcements.

The work behind that reputation began in 1976, when he co-founded Apple and argued that computers ought to be usable by ordinary people. The Macintosh carried that argument into practice with a graphical interface and a mouse. He returned again and again to one idea: that technology should sit alongside the liberal arts, not apart from them. He was a demanding boss, and the products that came out of that pressure tended to be tightly focused and integrated. After internal conflict he left the company in 1985 and started NeXT, building workstations for education and business — a small market, though its software would matter enormously later. In the same period he took over the computer graphics operation that became Pixar, pushing it to pair rendering technology with actual storytelling craft. Toy Story arrived in 1995.

Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Jobs came back. He cut the product line down, put weight on design, reliability and control of the whole ecosystem, and rebuilt the Mac's standing through hardware, industrial design and software that held together. The iPod changed how people carried music; the iTunes Store changed how it was sold. In 2007 the iPhone recast the smartphone around multi-touch and an app platform, and the App Store that followed created an entire software economy, with knock-on effects across fields from photography to transport. The iPad took the same simplicity argument into tablets.

He cared about typography, materials and finish, working from the belief that details decide outcomes. Through serious illness he kept his hand on product direction and on the company's culture. He died in 2011, leaving behind both a company and a design philosophy that still shape how products are made.