Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

There’s no magic to the product planning cycle at Apple beyond a ruthless focus on a limited set of use cases. What each product does in the first iteration is going to be narrow, but those things are going to be airtight.

The Newton group was more like a startup at the time, and so for once I was able to execute some of the ideas we’d had in the design group. It wasn’t until Jobs came back that what we were trying to do got any traction outside of the Newton group. DOUG SATZGER, industrial design creative lead (now vice president of industrial design at Intel) We wo

failure to understand what Steve was trying to do with user experience.

under [then CEO] Gil Amelio, design didn’t mean anything. You’d design a product, and marketing would say, “Well, we only gave you $15 to do this and it’s gonna cost us $20, so we’re gonna badge a Dell computer or Canon printer.” We were a marketing-driven company that wasn’t focused on design or even delivering a product. We became just another PC

Neither Ive, nor anyone else at Apple,

was willing to speak on the record for this story, preferring to let the work speak for itself—and to preserve the company’s fastidiously cultivated mythology. As a result, this is a story different from any other you’ve ever read about Apple. It is an oral history of Apple’s design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped crea

of type you’d see in magazines, anything that might look familiar to people. The goal, always, was real-world references. I was from suburban Philadelphia, so I named the fonts after stops on the Paoli Local—so Rosemont, Paoli, Ardmore, Overbrook. Steve thought city names were fine, but he asked why would we pick these little cities that nobody had

Macintosh had been an under-resourced research project, a prototype with no clear path to shipping. Steve saw it had a chance to be the future of the personal computer industry.

adds to confusion and clutter.

Ive explained the use of colors as a way to make the iMac “more egalitarian, more accessible, and more open.” Instead of going into a computer store and making a decision based on the speed of a computer’s processor and the size of its hard drive, customers were simply asked which color they wanted.