What I Learned as a Product Designer at Apple

Design is hope made visible.

You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.

When talent doesn’t hustle, hustle beats talent. But when talent hustles, watch out.

When you work only for money, without any love for what you do in and of itself, your work will lac... See more

Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent . The powerful people you need as allies will likely know little about design and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your ... See more

How he puts together his talks When I give a speech I use Keynote. I was actually one of the first users of Keynote. I live in it, and it’s the way I think about things.  When I give a talk I have about 200 slides, and none of the slides have words on them. Each has a picture and the picture brings up a story that I want to talk about. Each st... See more

But even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts made that read “90 hours a week and loving it!” Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly st... See more

If everyone is busy making everything,

how can anyone perfect anything?

We start to confuse convenience with joy.

Abundance with choice.

Designing something requires focus.

The first thing we ask is:

What do we want people to feel?

Delight.

Surprise.

Love.

Connection.

Then we begin to craft around our intention.

It takes time.

There are a thousand no’s for ever... See more

people new to design tend to confuse an idea for the expression of an idea. Ideas are easy, because they don't rely on specifics. Expressing ideas is incredibly difficult, because doing it well requires a deep understanding of the medium that is only possible by having worked in it, such as understanding which methods to use where, identifying subt... See more