Reuters has collected some great quotes from leading designers in regards to Steve Jobs legacy.  Here are a few:

“Many credit Apple as probably the best advertisement for professional design and the role of design that we have ever seen”

“Steve Jobs has shown that breakthrough products come from taking intuitive risks, not from listening to focus groups. He was a master of semiotic design,”

Although it had become a running joke with clients that we should “make their product look like an iPhone” or that a proposed design “looks like an iPod” there is quite a bit of seriousness to this remark.

When I saw the iPod in the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt I was initially taken aback.  It was too commonplace, too mainstream to be in a design museum, but there it was.  Then it hit me.  The iPod/iPhone is the most well designed, successful, mass market product of modern times.  Its clean, simple, elegant design has been copied by many, but emulated by few.

Steve Jobs has shown us that good design doesn’t have to be a niche market and that the public will pay for it.