Steve Jobs: Designer First, C.E.O. Second
By NICK BILTON
If you walked into the office of almost any chief executive and asked him or her to describe a favorite font, I’m pretty sure you would be greeted with a blank stare and silence. If you asked Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, you had better make yourself comfortable: Mr. Jobs was passionate about typography and would have described, in great detail, the intricacies of a single serif.
That is what made Mr. Jobs’s products feel so impeccable. He didn’t just pore over spreadsheets, personnel issues and revenue numbers, as most C.E.O.’s are expected to do. He thought about design, too. In fact, he went beyond thinking about it. He obsessed over it — every curve, every pixel, every ligature, every gradient.
In his widely noted commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Mr. Jobs explained where this design passion came from, describing a typography class he attended after dropping out of college:
“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 sans-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.“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 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.”
His focus on the little things like the “space between different letter combinations” was a constant from the development of the Macintosh to the iPhone, which was released more than 20 years later.
This is what separated Mr. Jobs, as a chief executive, from everyone else.
When Mr. Jobs resigned as Apple’s chief executive in August, Vic Gundotra, senior vice president for engineering at Google, posted an account of anexchange with Mr. Jobs before the introduction of the iPhone.
Mr. Gundotra said Mr. Jobs had called him on a Sunday morning with an “urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away.” Mr. Jobs said: “I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that O.K. with you?”
The hundreds of designers who had been involved in the iPhone development didn’t notice that the shading in a yellow O might have a slightly incorrect gradient. But Mr. Jobs did.
But the greatest example of Mr. Jobs’s attention to detail and design can be found in the little millimeter-sized glowing light that appears on every MacBook Laptop. The light, known as a sleep indicator, glows when the laptop is closed, or sleeping. Competing laptops have this feature too, but Apple’s is different.
The Mac sleep indicator is timed to glow at the average breathing rate of an adult: 12 breaths per minute. As with the space between typographic letter on the Macintosh, only Mr. Jobs could pay attention to such detail.
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