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

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

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.

started while Jobs was running Pixar and NeXT.

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

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

adds to confusion and clutter.

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

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,