As I was admiring my own iPhone the other day, I asked myself “just what is it that makes Apple’s designs so sexy?” As there are many bits and bobs out there on the internet—from quotes, to articles, to interviews that speak to the issue, I determined to further explore them to see if I couldn’t squeeze out a bit more information, the secret, or secrets if you will, behind the design process that enables Steve Jobs to render the Apple products, stores, graphics, and software of his eye so beautifully, aided brilliantly by his design wing man, Johnny Ives. As for where to begin, I like to bypass opinion entirely and go straight to the horse’s mouth, and so, began to troll the internet for “Steve Jobs Design Quotes”.

    First up, from a November of 2003 interview by the New York Times for an article entitled “The Guts of a New Machine” about a new little gadget making the rounds called the iPod—Steve Jobs clarified what he meant by Apple’s great sense of design “it’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” No secret there. Anyone who has ever picked up a book about architecture or design surely would have come across the reigning mantra of the twentieth century “form ever follows function”, coined in 1896 by architect Louis Sullivan in an article he wrote entitled “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”. Although Sullivan’s succinct observation which to my mind defines the spine of design, still holds up one hundred years later, it does little to define the flesh of it.  What else might Steve Jobs have observed about the nature of good design on record that puts meat on Sullivan’s spine of design?

Form Follows Intention

In answer to a question about the importance of design for Apple’s products for a Fortune Magazine interview in 2000 Jobs answered “We don’t have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. 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.” Ah yes, the soul. I think he reveals something that cuts rather closer to the heart of his design approach here. In having recognized what he calls the soul of an object, Jobs recognizes that one must go beyond function and add intention to  manifest a form that has the power to not only work, but beyond that, to inspire the user. Still no flesh, but soul, yes. We’ve got the riddle. We’ve got the wrapper of mystery. We’ve yet to get inside the enigma. Moving on...

   

Bringing Sexy Back

Digging back even further into past quotes, I uncovered an observation Jobs made in July of 1997 just before his return to Apple about what had happened to the products in his absence. “The products suck. There’s no sex in them anymore.” Here we go. Jobs wasn’t trying to talk about his design process, he was having a fully visceral response to the fact that the design of these objects had lost the power to touch him, to move him. They didn’t make sense because they weren’t sensuous. Isn’t that what we mean when we say an object isn’t sexy? We don’t desire it. It doesn’t attract us. It doesn’t make us want to touch it, and touchability really does cut close to the secret behind what takes Apple’s designs from simply great to “insanely great”, how Jobs himself likes to describe the resonance of Apple’s products. Touch is to design what flesh is to the body. Touch is the interface in which design comes to life. Da Vinci knew it (see “Vitruvian Man” from 1487). Vitruvius knew it (read “de Architectura” from 15 BC). Almost as if it were a sign given to let me know I was on the right path, I ran across this last zinger before I left the internet—to my mind, the most telling Steve Jobs design quote of them all given to Business Week in November of 1998 in answer to how just how good the new Apple products were going to be “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

Licking the Keyboard

Next post. Stay tuned...