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

Outsiders have tended to assume that because cofounder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs was a champion of products in which hardware and software work together seamlessly, Apple itself was a paragon of cross-collaboration. In fact, the opposite was often true. And though Jobs was without a doubt the single most important figure in the company’s history,

Marc Newson,

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

Tolomeo lamp,

started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT.

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

The challenge in delivering simplicity is, marketing wants to bring more functionality to bear, engineering wants to bring more options to bear—and all of that just

For the Mac we did a Picasso-like logo done by an artist in San Francisco named John Casado.

There was an overarching idea of a computer your mom could use. So the typefaces couldn’t look like those weird monospaced computer fonts. I looked at Helvetica and Times New Roman and the kinds