happy friday!

In 1984 Steve Jobs introduced the first MacIntosh computer and forever changed the Graphic Design industry. In honor of Steve Jobs' Day we decided to pay tribute to our first Apple products: a 2000 graphite iMac and 2005 pink iPod mini. Our Apple family has grown quite a bit since those first purchases and their innovative products continue to be an integral part of both our personal and professional lives. Thanks, Steve!

photos taken on our iPhones

steve jobs: 1955-2011

Today at work Billy went next door to our work neighbor's office and when he came back he looked at me and asked, "Did you hear the news?"

"What news?" I asked. I hear a lot of news every day!

"Steve Jobs passed away."

My heart immediately sank. Even with knowing that he had been battling cancer, the news still felt sadly unexpected.

Since I have known Billy he has always been telling me about the cutting edge things Apple's cofounder and former CEO, Steve Jobs, has done and said.

A couple years ago when Billy and I were in debate mode over if he should really leave Sam's Club, I came across Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech. You may recall we have posted it here on the blog before.

It's as if everything clicked in those moments of hearing him talk, and when Billy came home from Sam's on his lunch break I said, "Let's do it."

We watched the video clip again together later that night and decided it was really now or never. We didn't want to waste another minute of our days living someone else's life. It was time to follow on our own path!

Of course the speech alone wasn't the deciding factor...we had done the legwork ourselves in getting to a position where we we had the talent and resources to open a business. We had prayed immensely for God's guidance, and we had pretty awesome clients (including Randy Meyer and team) that also played significant role's in building our courage to take a chance.

However, I will never forget how hearing Steve Job's speech made me feel. It awakened a belief in me that somehow had fallen asleep...To do great work, you have to love and believe in what you do. I love and believed in my role as a mother and wife and watching my husband's energy and creativity slowly die with every passing day he logged in at Sam's Club...it was time for a new chapter in our lives. It was time for both of us to do great work that we loved and believed in.

I think I've quoted Steve too many times to count on our business FB page.

He was an innovator by all means of the word. He lead by example and his love for clean design is part of Apple's Legacy.

Billy made the above Apple logo timeline for reminiscing's sake. 

Steve. You wanted to put a "ding in the universe". You did.

Our condolences to Mr. Jobs' family and friends. We will all miss him dearly.

our toolbox

10 years ago Billy bought his first computer. It was an Apple imac in graphite and at the time it was pretty cutting edge.

4 years later he picked up an Apple ibook to begin his student years at Chico State.

Sadly, a little over a year later the ibook died and we picked up an Apple MacBook Pro.

Now that we are less than a week until we move into the studio, it's time to upgrade again.

27 inches of pure Apple goodness with customized upgrades. Can't wait for it to get here and to set it up at our new studio! It's fun to see how much technology has changed just in the past 10 years...but that's Apple for you! Always leading the way through innovativeness and plain old good design.

*stock images from google search

connecting the dots

In a powerful speech given by Apple Inc. cofounder and chief executive Steve Jobs said,“You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

So today I am blogging the first entry of Connecting The Dots; an ongoing series you will find here on the Different By Design blog. Brace yourself! I'll try to be brief but I don't want to leave out too much!

What many people do not realize is that apart from all the work we do at Different By Design, we also have other huge and time consuming responsibilities. Billy is a manager at Sam's Club where he works 50 plus hours a week. We have 3 young children that do not attend day care (though one does go to school) but I am the primary caregiver of them 365 days a year. As if we weren't busy enough, last summer I started making hair pieces for my younger sisters and then literally that hobby turned into a business that just took off.

They say when you start a business it takes around 3 years to become profitable. However, with hair pretties they were an overnight success. Originally I started out giving one to anyone that asked about them because I wasn't planning on starting a business. After I gave away over $400 (my cost) in hair accessories I knew something had to change! So in a blink of an eye I suddenly had another business to operate.

Because other than raising our children and Sam's Club, our main goal has always been to focus on the growth and the maintaining of excellent service to our clients at Different By Design, I began to force myself to slow down on making hair pretties. Some of these steps included not going the usual route of opening up a full time etsy shop and turning down offers of being carried in stores. I also chose to move the hair pretties facebook page from a public page to a private one so I could better control the communications between hair pretties and my wonderful customers.

These last few months have felt like we have had 0 free time as a family. After putting in over 10 hours a day at Sam's, Billy is home and I am briefing him on where we are at with all our clients and design jobs. After that everyone is off to bed and then I am up into the early hours of morning fulfilling dozens of hair pretties orders! I made a resolution in 2011 to change that and to limit the amount of orders I am taking.

I finally got to the point where I was ready to announce that I was taking a hair pretties sabbatical when I went in to accept a new friends request on the hair pretties facebook page. It was from a man and I assumed it was on behalf of his wife. I decided to visit his his facebook page since it is far and few between when men are putting in friends request to hair pretties!

I saw that he had listed Pixar (yes..that amazing animation studio that we have to thank for Up, Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles and every other amazing children's movie in existence) as his employer.

I sent him a quick message thanking him for the friends request and mentioned that my kids were going to think I was a celebrity since a Pixar employee was a friend to hair pretties!

To wrap up that encounter, the Pixar employee's lovely wife who was referred by another favorite hair pretties' customer Natalie (she graduated Chico State with Billy) ended up ordering some hair pretties for their adorable little girl and her husband later wrote back to say that though they were busy now with Cars 2 preparing to release, he invited us to come down and meet his family and...tour the Pixar Studio!

I nearly died when I read his message! When Billy was a student at Chico State he had the honor of touring a couple of top notch design firms...we were recently discussing how we would LOVE to tour some true creative studios but weren't sure how to go about doing that.

Then just like that, all because I started selling hair accessories we had an invitation from a Pixar employee to tour their studio. In our eyes, Pixar is king of creativeness...to think we are going to get to actually visit their work space and environment is truly a dream come true.

                                                                                     
And while I absolutely LOVE all my hair pretties customers, I do still plan to announce a break from hair pretties soon. However, I am so thankful to God for connecting those dots. When I "started" hair pretties it was (and for the most part still is) really something I did just for fun.

I would have never dreamed in a million years that hair pretties would have provided an opportunity for us to visit the Pixar Animation Studios, but I feel incredibly blessed it worked out that way.

SO. Though we don't always realize it when we are going about our day to day lives, I fully believe that there is a reason for everything and that in hindsight we will be amazed how the dots in our lives connected. Did you know that Steve Jobs also cofounded Pixar? How's that for dot connecting! :)

*second photo of the Pixar Animation Studio found on techeblog.com