Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

the joys of collaborating with designers who could bring refinement and elegance to the look and feel of our apps,

Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs.

Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university, an immersion program where the next exam was always around the corner.

I have identified seven elements essential to Apple’s software success: Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs

He might say to me “I just heard Steve reported a bad bug.” The actual message he’d received had been more like: “the f***ing caps lock button doesn’t work in today’s build! don’t you people test this f***ing keyboard?!”

After many experiments, we’d moved as many keys as possible off the main layout displaying the letters, devoting the reclaimed space to making individual letter keys as big as possible. Even then, a typical finger covered between two and three letter keys. In our final design, we made punctuation and numbers available under a separate layout accessible by tapping a .?123 key. We worried there would be howls and complaints about the inconvenience of this arrangement, but it turned out to be one of those things that people adapted to readily and accepted without much fuss.

All these demos helped the entire software team stay focused on making great products. This was all down to Steve. When he tacked on his “Thank you,” it was his way of saying that my demo went just as he wanted. The meeting had been productive and decisive. It was a pattern to remember and replicate.