It was 20th May 2023, I was on my first solo trip from Delhi to Bengaluru for the upcoming design internship at redBus when I finished this amazing book called Jony Ive : The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products. It took me around 2.5 months to complete this book. It's an incredible book for any designer. To all those who aspire to read this book, I have shared my top 5 learning from this book.
"To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product. At the level that Jonathan was working, it becomes like a love affair. The process is exhilarating . . . and exhausting. But unless you're willing to give everything to the work, the design will not be great."
It's a very good thing to think about. If you don't put your heart and soul into the product that you are building, you are not going to make it big. Every product that has been successful in the past or in the present, involves a hell lot of team effort which consumer doesn't see but it's there. You have to push yourself to do 5% extra than what has been assigned to you as a task to make products that users love using. You have to know their behaviour and their way of thinking more than them to build products that sell itself.
"The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better".
Being better at something requires a lot of effort than being different at something. Apple follows this same principle till date. Take iPhone for instance. Apple is not selling the world's best smartphone but they are indeed selling the world's best user experience of a smartphone. On top of this, there are constantly improving that experience by deeply understanding consumer behaviour. You have to be at least 10x better in order to build products that leave huge impact on consumer behaviour or change their behaviour unknowingly.
"Why give the consumer a big ugly tower just because it's the easiest option for the engineers and designers?"
Mediocre designers are first-order thinkers whereas great designers are second-order thinkers. You have to constantly keep challenging your status quo and build products on top of it that are easiest for the consumers to use and not for the designers and engineers to build. You have to constantly keep asking yourself, "How can I make it more efficient and easier for the consumers?" Innovation is the key and Apple is the king when it comes to creating innovative products.
"A big definition of who you are as a designer, it's the way you look at the world. And I guess one of the curses of what you do, is you are constantly looking at something and thinking, 'Why? Why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?'"
Having a strong appetite of curiosity is one of the great traits that separates a great designer from a mediocre one. You have to constantly keep questioning, "Why is this object shaped liked this and not something else? and so on. By asking questions like these, you are sort of reverse engineering a product and thinking how we can make it better for the consumers. In fact, everything around us is design. All that is required is a great sense of observation by you as a designer.
"For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
"Design is not just how it looks, but how it works" said Steve Jobs is the fastest way for any designer to cover up their inaptitude for designing great products. He is the one who deeply cared about aluminium which was used to make earlier Mac devices. He is the one who delayed the release of a product because the typography was not correct. Aesthetics do matter a lot. It's a simple human behaviour, if something doesn't look good you won't use it for long no matter how good it is functionally. Form and function go hand-in-hand. Design for form first and function will follow.
Of course, there are a lot more learnings from this book but I found these top 5 to be really insightful and interesting. If I have to summarise the entire book in one single line, it would be this,
"I don't think there is any designer in this world who has not been inspired by Jonathan Ive, if they do exists, probably they do not understand what design really is".
So that's the summary of an amazing book on an incredible designer who has served as Chief Design Officer at Apple for about 20 years and saved apple from going near bankruptcy in its early days after the return of Steve Jobs.
Thanks everyone for reading till this point!
stay hungry stay foolish…