Viva Steve – Jobs implied Design and here is Apple …
Subdued, charismatic, crazy, genius, drop-out, CEO, showman, pillar – in John Sculley’s words in the beginning of personal computer revolution “Steve was thinking about something entirely different” – dearth of words leads to call him the ‘Fake Turtleneck Magician’. Black polo-neck, ragged jeans and sports shoes – the Man still stands Tall and Towering, it will take a while to scale such heights even to match up with Him!
John Sculley is famous / infamous for once being Steve’s boss, who fired him from Apple – the reasons behind Steve being fired from his own company are no more relevant but what Sculley had to say about Him might offer valuable insights to His Character – he said that Steve had a totally different perspective, he always harped on starting from the user-experience. And Steve employed Sculley with the idea of transforming Apple to a consumer product company. That typically looked like an outrageous idea to Sculley, as back in 80s all were under the impression that PCs were just the little brothers of Bigger Computers, a dominant IBM view, what more – some even felt those would be more like plain-Jane game machines. But Steve ‘was a person of huge vision. He was also a person who believed in the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about everything — a perfectionist to the end.’
What Steve did to turn the table around was – delving deep into user-experience and design. He felt that industrial design should not be compared to what others were doing but with jewelery. On one hand Steve used to work on the high-level of changing the world, on the other hand He used to work down to every precise detail that goes to create the product and design its software, hardware and the peripheral products. He believed in walking extra miles and taking extraordinary risks to launch novel products but they were all built from the vantage point of a Designer. Steve was a Designer and in Apple every tidbit is done by being understood via the designer’s lens. Steve compelled designers to develop everything beautifully design … even the practice/demo boards where product components or system parts are laid out have to be well-designed.
Walking down the Memory Lane, Steve Jobs’ Stanford’s 2005 Commencement – listeners call it a ‘Verbal Typography … You get to see & hear verbal full stop, comma, exclamatory mark in his speech. Words chosen for speech is like a brilliant job of copyrighting to inspire & motivate people’ (Mandar Apte, designer). In Steve’s words – “In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. 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 of the product or service. The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.”
The obsession began when he dropped out and decided to head for a calligraphy class. That turned out to be the watershed of His life. He instantly took to it – Serif and San Serif typefaces, varying space between letter combinations - so artistically subtle! Ten years later, while designing the foremost Macintosh computer it all crawled back to him, and that was the first-ever computer with beautiful typography.
Steve said: “I don't see enough innovation like that in our industry … it reminded me of Detroit in the '70s, when American cars were boats on wheels. That's why we have a really good chance to be a serious player again.”
Now Apple is a $350 billion company but the Steerer is no more; however, the more the Fruit matures the better the Gardener would be remembered! Long Live The King!
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