Creative Selection Quotes

“When you tapped the zoom button on our iPad demo, the keyboard you were looking at (say, mine) transitioned to the other one (his), much like clicking to go to the next slide in presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint. The image of one keyboard disappeared to nothingness to reveal the other underneath. Bas added scaling to his animation—the keys of the departing keyboard changed size to match the one coming into view. He also tuned the timing of the animation, so it started slowly and sped up as it went, making you feel you had definitively landed once the animation finished. These effects were subtle, given that his animation was a mere fraction of a second, but Bas had a way of making these details count. When you looked at this zoom key animation, it appeared as if the keyboards were undergoing a complex morph. They weren’t. From an engineering perspective, this was significant, since the simplicity of the design meant I could write the code for his animation in just a couple hours. The magic was in the overall effect. The animation didn’t look like clicking from one slide to another in a presentation deck. When you tapped on the zoom button, it made you feel like one keyboard was becoming the other. The effect registered viscerally. It was exactly the kind of self-explanatory touch that made Apple software easy to use.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“They were always wary of showing Steve something he might like but that we might not be able to ship in a product. Scott didn’t run an ivory tower research and development department. Our demos to Steve carried the promise that we could deliver, and since showing work to Steve implied this willingness to commit, very few demos shown for the first time in these earlier meetings proceeded to him without further refinement. Sometimes there were several rounds of feedback and changes over many weeks before Scott would give the approval to bring the work into Diplomacy.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Greg Christie, one of his other senior managers, the day-to-day leader of the Human Interface team, the software designers responsible for the look and feel of iOS and the Mac, as well as the concepts behind how these systems functioned.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“This was part of Steve’s mission for Apple, the most significant strand of Apple’s product development DNA: to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“item in a list, say an email message, to delete it. The software we created at Apple was an accumulation of such small details.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“More generally, he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible, and he was willing to invest his own time, effort, and influence to see that they were.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Although Steve’s opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products. He wanted Apple products to be great, and he insisted on being involved in the process as it went along, to guide the development of the work through his reviews. That’s why I was waiting to show him my demo. He wanted to see my latest progress and then push the work toward his ideal with his feedback and suggestions.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Steve was at the center of all the circles. When he was in sufficiently good health—he had returned only a couple months earlier from his second health-related leave of absence in five years—he made all the important product decisions. He used these demo reviews as his chief means of deciding how Apple software should look and feel and function.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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 There weren’t any company handbooks describing these elements. Nobody outlined this list in a new-employee orientation. There weren’t any signs affixed to the walls of our Cupertino campus exhorting us to “Collaborate!” On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking. Therefore, our approach flowed from the work. This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs, and it happened from the ground up, through the daily efforts of designers and programmers you’ve never heard of, people like me and my colleagues, some of whom I’ll tell you about.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Today, on the day I’m writing this introduction, hundreds of millions of people will use these Apple products, and if you count the browsers on Windows and Google Android that use code based on the Safari browser I helped develop, then the number of daily users runs to well over a billion, perhaps it’s closer to two. Yet we never thought about such big numbers. We were too busy focusing on small details.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize the impact of your most difficult effort. Combine inspiration, decisiveness, and craft to make demos.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important software in the company’s history.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Bas Ording,”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. And though coming up with such a vision is difficult, it’s unquestionably more difficult to complete the entire circuit, to come up with an idea, a plan to realize the idea, and then actualize the plan at a high standard, all without getting bogged down, changing direction entirely, or failing outright. Perhaps the most unnerving and fear-inducing source of anxiety is that your ideas, words, and resulting vision might not be any good to start with and wouldn’t yield success even with a faithful follow-through.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Such questions miss the point: We tried to be tasteful and collaborative and diligent and mindful of craft and the rest in all the things we did, all the time. Everything counts. No detail is too small.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Shallow beauty in products doesn’t serve people. Product design should strive for a depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does, not merely in how it looks and feels.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions like these was to avoid the need to ask them.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve 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.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs