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

adds to confusion and clutter.

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 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

Ron Johnson wanted to brainstorm what it was going to be. We had the global head of customer service for the Ritz-Carlton and two kids who sold Macs at CompUSA. We had the architects who were going to design the store. We had this incredibly brilliant graphic artist. We sat in that room for a couple of days. That’s where the Genius Bar was invented

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.

A lot of companies start the design process by blocking things out with wireframes, like, the contact list goes here, and there’s a big wireframe with an X through it. Apple would start with these gorgeous mock-ups in Photoshop and Flash—or Shockwave at the time. There’s no code behind it, and you can only do one thing, but you get the feel.

They focused on making people love the product. And that’s the distinction at the end of the day. Everybody else was focusing on being smart. Apple focused on being loved.

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

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