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About Kitchen Designer Jobs

Beyond some phenomenal products, Steve Jobs helped define exactly what good design meant for the computer age. Here are his most enduring ideals.

[This is the second installment in a series of posts that we’re doing as we read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Click here to read the first.—Ed.]

Everyone who cares, even modestly, about design can name a few decisive events that set them on that path. Steve Jobs was no different, but he was also extraordinarily lucky: The formative design lessons he got were so far ahead of their time that they would lay the groundwork for Apple’s success with the Macintosh, the iMac, iPhone, and the iPad. Here’s six of the defining design lessons that Jobs learned, and which imbued every product he created.

CRAFT, ABOVE ALL

Under Jobs, Apple became famous for a level of craft that seemed almost gratuitous: For example, on the "Sunflower" Macintosh of a few years ago, there was an exquisitely fine, laser-etched Apple logo. As an owner, you might see that logo only once a year, when moving the computer. But it mattered, because that single time made an impression. In the same way, Jobs spent a lot of time making the circuit boards of the first Macintosh beautiful—he wanted their architecture to be clean and orderly. Who cared about that? But again, that level of detail would have made a deep impression on the few people that would have seen the inner guts.

[One of the high points of Apple’s attention to craft: The phenomenal fit and finish of the iPhone 4]

So in a way, it’s not a surprise that this level of craft was one of the first design lessons that Jobs ever got, and he learned at the hands of his father. Quoting Isaacson:

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. …In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood in the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

2, 3, AND 4: EMPATHY, FOCUS, AND…IMPUTE?!

In the early 1980s, design was a niche profession, and "design thinking," a process that emphasized empathy with user needs, hadn’t been fully articulated yet. But Mike Markkula—one of the first investors in Apple, one of the first grown-ups to work there, and another father figure to Jobs—managed to anticipate lessons that were decades away from being in common circulation. He was the one that wrote "The Apple Marketing Philosophy," a memo that you can think of as the fundamental DNA of Apple over three decades:

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; it we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."

n the context of the time, the idea of consumer empathy is truly remarkable. Keep in mind: If you wanted to find superb consumer electronics, you mostly looked to Japan. There, the attitude that prevailed for so many decades was that devices shouldn’t be designed for consumers; if they didn’t get them, it was their fault. It was that idea that led to so many bloated and weird Sony and Panasonic products over the years. Another thing to remember: Markkula is talking about consumer empathy before Apple even really has consumers! This is before the Macintosh, before the graphic user interface, and before the mouse. This was during a time when the people who used computers were freakishly engaged hobbyists. Their threshold for accepting a products quirks and flaws was enormous, and most computer makers took that for granted.

Not Markkula, not Apple, and not Jobs. The idea of understanding a consumer’s needs before they actually needed what Apple was making has remained a hallmark of the company throughout its history. The idea of empathizing with a consumer before a market was even developed set Apple on the path of perpetually looking forward to find how people would behave.