Steve Jobs on Design: How Things Work
What Jobs talks about
In this internal Apple video, Jobs and his colleagues describe design as something deeper than appearance. The focus is on how products work, and how that idea shapes Apple’s culture and decisions.
The transcript emphasizes Jobs’s willingness to reject something that is merely good if it is not great. It frames design as a discipline that demands judgment, collaboration, and the courage to keep improving.
The video also shows Jobs as a leader who creates a setting where designers can do their best work. His vision is presented as inclusive, future-focused, and able to unite people from different disciplines.
Jobs appears alongside Jony Ive and Susan Kare, who both speak about his role in design.
In his words
“Design is a really loaded word.”
“Most people think it's how they look, but it's not really how they look.”
“It's how they work.”
“It's just not really great.”
“Steve really felt that we could do better”
Key points
- Design is not just how something looks; it is how it works.
- Apple does not talk about design abstractly; it talks about making things work well.
- Great products require the discipline to reject merely good solutions.
- Jobs had the vision to push the team toward a better iMac design.
- He created an environment where designers could produce terrific work.
- His vision drew people from different disciplines into a shared future.
Full transcript
Design is a really loaded word. I don't know what it means. And so we don't really talk about design a lot around here. We actually just talk about how things work. Most people think it's how they look, but it's not really how they look. It's how they work. I think Steve is a design champion by action, not by talking about design. I think that he's a collaborator, that he really understands design, not academically, but as a participant. Steve not only is a champion of design, but creates an environment for designers that's conducive to producing terrific work. Everyone says, you know, I want to make a great product or I want to make a great movie or whatever they're doing.
There's no difference there, but there's a big difference in the outcomes. When we were developing the new iMac, we were at a point when we had a couple of solutions that, I mean, at the time I think we thought they were good. But we had that sinking feeling, you know, when you start to, you are aware that you're trying to convince yourself something's actually better than in your heart you really know that it is. Sometimes you just have to look at yourself and go, you know, it's just not really great. It's okay, it's good, but let's not fool ourselves and call it great. Steve really felt that we could do better and we all realized we needed to. I mean, that's a hard, hard call to make. You know, we're willing to throw something away because it's not great and try again when all of the pressures of commerce are at your back saying, no, you can't do that.
Steve is so much more than a supporter of design. He not only has a very clear sort of sense of vision and sense of the future, but has this sort of unnerving ability to describe the future in a way that's very inclusive, in a way that draws people from many different disciplines sort of in to share this sense of what this vision could be.
Transcribed from the audio with OpenAI Whisper. Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.