Steve Jobs as a Designer

When Apple announced the passing of their former CEO, Steve Jobs, many people across the world were saddened – including me. It brought me back to my first conscious encounter with an Apple computer in 2002.

It was an old Power Macintosh, probably made in the mid-90s. It was bulky and still had a disk drive for the ancient Verbatim bendy floppy disks. It was more or less a decade old. I rolled my eyes at the computers thinking that my high school was so poor we had to put up with the old machines. When I finally used it, I was so surprised by how it managed a much newer OS and softwares like Adobe Photoshop 7 (new at that time). I was impressed because I knew that the 1-year old family computer wouldn’t be able to handle that at all. I was an instant fan.

But being an Apple fan wasn’t the reason why I had a connection with Steve Jobs. It was who he was before Apple.

In June 2005, Steve spoke during the Stanford University commencement. There, he revealed side of him that I didn’t know about. A side of him that was much closer to my heart.

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

Before all the iPods, computers, cellphones, and becoming a CEO of Apple and Pixar, Steve Jobs was a designer. His fascination in typography was inspiring.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

In his recently released biography, Walter Isaacson shares that Steve Jobs was obsessed with arranging the circuit boards of the Apple computes. He wanted the interior of the computers to be clean, orderly, and beautiful. Most people wouldn’t care what the inside of the compute looked like. I haven’t even seen what an inside of an Apple computer look like. But to Steve, it was important. In a Playboy interview in 1985, he shared a lesson he learned from his father.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Then I realized why I liked Apple products so much. It isn’t just the power of the machines because admittedly there are many more machines available in the market that are much more powerful. It was the intentional design and the passion behind the products. Steve Jobs was the designer behind the sleek and clean feel of the products. He was the reason why everything in operating system had a unified look. He was also the reason why it is so intuitive and easy to use. He was obsessed with every detail and it just works.

Through his passion for design came more than just wonderful products but he created a dent in the universe.

Thank you Steve!

I recommend to listen to his entire Stanford University speech if you haven’t.

---