Quotes About Design

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product.

You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance," recalled Schiller. "That meant design and engineering had to work together.

As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing

Macintosh." Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.

stereo system with MartinLogan speakers

PDP-1 was the first computer to be designed for direct interaction with the user.

Piense visualmente.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MACS Setting Apple Apart

But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.

no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements. 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

So that's our approach. Very simple, and we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple.

Apple's design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics," Jobs recalled. "I realized they were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which is what I've always been interested in.

This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC's rat's nest of cables and resetting its switches. At first the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which may have been why it was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to become engineers. But what the women of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to understand, was that the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that "nature loves simplicity and unity." So did Steve Jobs.

Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.

rethink things. There was something about the design that lacked purity, he felt. "Why

to itself." Jobs went home early that day to mull over the problem, then called Ive

No, that's not right," Ferris replied. "The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.

as to the current or future directions of Apple's product designs, nor do other design firms we might deal with, so it is possible to inadvertently design similar looking products. It is in both Apple's and NeXT's best interest to rely on Hartmut

But then he paused to recognize the role Jobs in fact played. "In so many other companies, ideas and great design get lost in the process," he said. "The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn't been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn