We went out and did a quick survey of our local Quality Food Center to see what products looked pretty in pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month(BCAM). Pink is my favorite color, so I love October at the grocery store. I really thought there would be more products rockin the pink, but we still found about 30. Here are some thoughts:

• Yogurt dominates BCAM, multiple brands and varieties. You could barely buy yogurt without fighting Breast Cancer.
• Lunch meat was an unlikely contender. I suppose people can’t resist a good breast pun.
• Cheese seems to be a common theme in BCAM products. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Velveeta, and Freschetta.
• Kroger/QFC did two products, bottled water and luch meat. This seems like an odd combination. Maybe these products’ packages are cheap to redesign.
• We didn’t see any female products supporting BCAM. No hairspray, shampoo, tampons, or makeup. Shame on them.
• A lack ‘health’ food sporting the ribbon, just the yogurts and Special K. Nothing from energy bars, teas, juices, oatmeals, etc.

For the record my two favorite pink packages are Ziplock and Emergen-C.

An excerpt from the Stanford Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

You should probably read the whole thing.