Apple Design

It's amusing, Fast Company's use of the term, "longread" -- something long to read. Apparently, on a screen, something is "long" when you have to scroll down. 

Max Chafkin in Fast Company's Co. DESIGN writes an excellent longread  survey of Apple's journey to design excellence. Videos, and a great slide show. 

An Oral History Of Apple Design: 1992–2013

THE GREATEST BUSINESS STORY OF THIS GENERATION IS A DESIGN TALE.

Most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex 37-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection--as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone. So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency through an oral history of Apple's design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped create it. A longer version of the story that includes material not published elsewhere is available in the Byliner original ebook, Design Crazy.

The Good

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"This is our signature," Apple's gauzy television ads proclaim, referring to the familiar words that the company stamps on the undersides of its products: designed by Apple in California. The ads fall in the grand Apple tradition--beginning with the "1984" Super Bowl spot--of seeming to say a great deal while revealing little. The singular Cupertino computer company is one of the most intensely competitive, pathologically secretive organizations in the world.

The Bad

If there is one thing that CEO Tim Cook doesn't want people to know, it's what dwells behind his company's "signature." As a result, most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex 37-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection--as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone.

So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency. It wasn't easy. Precious few designers have left Sir Jonathan Ive's industrial design group since he took over in 1996: Two quit; three died. (We talked to the two who quit, among dozens of other longtime Apple veterans.) What we found is that the greatest business story of the past two decades--how Apple used design to rise from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world--is completely misunderstood.

Article continues at link above. 

The REALLY Bad