The New Yorker’s Ian Parker recently wrote a profile of Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design. From what I’ve seen on Twitter and read on other sites, its publication—all 17,000 words of it—basically had tech and design enthusiasts salivating. I just finished reading it, finally. The piece has a lot of never before reported details on the development of Apple Watch, the company after Steve Jobs, and the rise of Ive’s abstract and operational power at the firm.
One important nugget of wisdom I think anyone can take away from the article has to do with the work of Apple’s designers, who are often regarded as the world’s best.
There’s a section where Parker is sharing details on the people who occupy the company’s design studio and how their “multinationalism, and their lives of individual affluence and shared reputation, would be familiar to soccer players on Europe’s grandest teams.” He then reveals that Apple has three headhunters focused exclusively on searching for design talent, and they find maybe one—!—a year. That’s saying something about the talent level of designers at our favourite consumer electronics company. We kind of already knew these guys were on a different level though—so what is further significant about them?
Consider what Parker tells us next:
Team members work twelve hours a day and can’t discuss work with friends. Each project has a lead designer, but almost everyone contributes to every project, and shares the credit. (Who had this or that idea? “The team.”) Ive describes his role as lying between two extremes of design leadership: he is not the source of all creativity, nor does he merely assess the proposals of colleagues. The big ideas are often his, and he has an opinion about every detail. Team meetings are held in the kitchen two or three times a week, and Ive encourages candor. “We put the product ahead of anything else,” he said. “Let’s say we’re talking about something that I’ve done that’s ugly and ill-proportioned—because, believe you me, I can pull some beauties out of the old hat. . . . It’s fine, and we all do, and sometimes we do it repeatedly, and we have these seasons of doing it—”
“I had one last week,” Akana said.
“Which one?” he asked.
“The packaging thing,” she said.
“That’s true,” Ive said, laughing. “It was so bad.”
Akana had proposed that an Ultrasuede cloth inside the box for a gold version of the Apple Watch should be an orangey-brown. Ive had objected with comic hyperbole, comparing it to the carpeting in a dismal student apartment. In the same amused spirit, Akana had then asked, “So you don’t like it?”
Did you catch that? The most talented designers and creatives in the world have bad ideas. Yes, they are capable of having bad ideas. Not just you. We should all be relieved to learn these types of things, and when it comes to our own work, this revelation should prompt us to remember a few things, including some insight from the book Creativity, Inc.
First, remember that no matter who you are, or how talented you are, the ideas, work, art, writing, or designs you come up with may not start out perfect. But it is in the intentional processes of refinement that they may be improved. Also, this refinement process often involves the sharing of your work or art, which brings me to the next point…
In the book Creativity, Inc., author Ed Catmull explains one of the most important axioms that the Pixar Brain Trust (the group of creatives responsible for all movie development) subscribes to. The core of it, as he writes, is that “You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”