Saddened to hear the news about Steve Jobs today, but inspired all over again by his wise words. Rather than a load of overblown sentimentality or sub-par FastCompany-esque analysis, here are three of my favourite clips of Steve’s amazing thoughtful clarity.

What an inspiration. Rest in peace Steve…

Title image via Jonathan Mak, clever bugger.

If you’re curious about how websites work, you’ve ever selected ‘view source’ to see the guts of the HTML, or you have wondered about the ominous ‘back-end’, then wonder no longer. Back of a webpage reveals the inner workings of your favourite websites and gives new meaning to pressing the browser’s ‘back’ button.

The photographic paper detail on the Flickr one is genius. Send you own submissions to backofawebpage@gmail.com Found via davidthedesigner – Made me smile too…

As it is now after noon, I can reveal this to be an April Fool.

Shame.

Well they say the iPad is the future of publishing, so it was only a matter of time before it colonised the past too. John Bonadies’s new project on Kickstarter aims to purchase a shedload of lovely old letterpress type to be digitised, and allow iPad users to make their own virtual letterpress compositions.

These can be used to generate images on the iPad itself for emailing and such, but the really interesting part is that it sounds like the system might eventually let you order an actual letterpress print of your design, and it is planned to hit other platforms such as the Mac soon afterwards.

They’ve got 25% of their $15,000 funding as I write this, and you can join in for as little as $1. Buying a guy on the internet a lovely letterpress collection is a bit like giving somebody else a load of money to go to Disneyland and send you the pictures, but they seem to have some nice open plans for sharing the type as a resource in the future, which hopefully means everyone will see some benefit.

Still, if I could persuade the internet to buy me a DeLorean that would be fantastic.

Letterpress is so specialist now that it has moved beyond the reach of most people who might be casually interested, or only modestly financed, so this is a nice way to open it up a bit. It could also be a great educational tool to teach classes about the history of type and let them get their virtual hands inky.

Head over to Kickstarter and donate some capital. Capital, geddit?

I was asked to talk about significant brand this week at work. I chose Apple.

Yes, I know, I know, it’s all painfully predictable. But it’s only a predictable choice because it’s an obvious example, and it’s only obvious because it’s true. I showed the above clip which I stumbled across online. It’s Steve Jobs explaining what Apple is about. And in just over one minute, he renders flip charts and cryptic diagrams useless. Get ready to squirm if ‘dynamic’ is one of your brand values.

A little bit of me dies inside every time I see Apple used on a mood board or held up in a branding meeting, not because I don’t love it, but because it’s become a lazy cop out for people who aren’t thinking hard enough. I actually think a lot of people have entirely forgotten what really makes Apple different. It isn’t just because they have sold a lot of iPods, made computers transparent or managed to get people to spend twice as much on a laptop, it’s smaller and more straightforward than that.

Apple isn’t perfect, but a lot of what I admire about them comes down to clarity, and Steve Jobs is clearly behind that. He reinvented the company since rejoining it in 1997. He’s an inspirational guy. If you’re curious about what makes him tick, watch the speech below. He starts talking about 7 and a half minutes in.

Not every brand has a Steve Jobs, but that’s no excuse for not having vision, appetite and clarity.

I’m quite excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet, or iPad, even though I’m not likely to be buying one.

Not as excited as I was about the iPhone though…

Those images above are genuine Apple prototypes from 1983, the image below however is real, ladies and gentlemen, the first ever Apple Computer from 1976…

Whatever is announced in a couple of hours, it’s sure to be impressive. Steve Jobs has been allegedly quoted as saying it’s the “most important thing I’ve ever done” With rumours ranging from the reinvention of newspapers, to fingerprint identification and impressive gaming capabilities, the idea is that you really DO need another shiny Apple product in your life.

We’ll see.