When we make a model and realize it's rubbish Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great. He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements. Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs Drawing as a means of thinking iteration
A ritual of unpacking I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story. Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs The Apple Marketing Philosophy ritual
To be truly simple Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. 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. Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs Less, but betterTool-being simplicity
That feeling of putting care into a product I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product. Unlike some designers, [Ive] didn't just make beautiful sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would work. He became head of [the design department at Apple] in 1996, the year before jobs returned, but wasn't happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design. There wasn't that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made. All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit. Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs
Beyond improvement In so many ways Dieter Rams’s work is beyond improvement. Although new technologies have since offered new opportunities, his designs are not undermined by the limits of the technologies of their time. The concave button top, designed to stop your finger from slipping as it made the long travel necessary for earlier mechanical switches, does not point to obsolete mechanisms. Instead, it reminds us how immediately and intuitively form alone can describe what an object does and suggest how we should use it. Jonathan Ive, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible designperfection
Eulogy for Steve Jobs An Article by Jonathan Ive www.wsj.com He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor. Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline. In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable. Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right. Steve Jobs curiositylearningideas
The Sense of Style A Book by Steven Pinker Classic styleThe assumption of equalityNominalizationThe curse of knowledgeStructural parallelism+2 More The Elements of Style writingcommunication
Classic style The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. truth
The assumption of equality Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. Long, unwieldy sentences respect
Nominalization The English language provides bad writers with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun. Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement. "Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria” would be better said as “we excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.” “There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation” would be better as “I don’t anticipate that I will have to cancel.” Zombie sounds, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples. language
The curse of knowledge The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail. Such tortuous syntax knowledgeteachingux
Structural parallelism If the new phrase has the same structure as the preceding one, its words can be slotted into the waiting tree, and the reader will absorb it effortlessly. The pattern is called structural parallelism, and it is one of the oldest tricks in the book for elegant (and often stirring) prose. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.” The principle of parallel construction
You live only once The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once. The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard." grammar
Such tortuous syntax How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order which each one occurs to him. The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily discovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words. Who the fuck is Guy Debord?The curse of knowledgeChoose a suitable design and hold to it