Sublime

When you’re evolving you need to understand the quintessential things that define your product. What’s key to your feature set and your branding? What have you trained the customer to look for? With the iPod it was the click wheel.

On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special po

Mariam Semaan is an award-winning journalist from Lebanon. She recently completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she specialised in media innovation and design thinking.

To run the group like an outside consultancy but within Apple, Brunner set up a loose management structure that largely persists today. The designers always worked together on whatever project the group was working on. “We’d work on multiple projects, and move from project to project, pretty much the way he [Jony] does it today,” Brunner explained.