Apple doesn't have the best designers or the biggest design team, nor does it use the strictest design process. That's according to a former Apple designer who worked seven years for the Cupertino-based company whose name is synonymous with ground-breaking design.
Mark Kawano is a former Apple senior designer for products such as Aperture and iPhoto. He also worked as an Apple User Experience Evangelist and helped Apple developers create apps that went well with the iOS platform. Before he went on to create his own app, Storehouse, Kawano was with Apple for seven years. He worked at the heart and center of operations at a critical time in Apple's life -- the release of the iPhone.
Speaking to Fast Company's Mark Wilson, Kawano enlightens us on how Apple comes up with its elegantly sleek designs and debunks the most common myths about the iPhone maker's design process. His first target: Apple has the best designers.
"I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever ... is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world," he says.
Kawano stresses that everyone at Apple, from the engineers to the marketers, "thinks like a designer." There is no room for corporate bureaucracy at Apple, thus they have all the time to spend working on design.
He also says that the myth that Apple has an infinite design team is just that, simply a myth. Apple doesn't have a thousand designers like Facebook and Google. When he was with Apple, only around 100 designers worked on Apple's core products.
"I knew every one of them by face and name," Kawano says.
The third misconception is one you're likely to see in other manufacturers' ad copy: Apple "crafts every detail with attention." The truth, Kawano says, is that "it's impossible to come up with really innovative things when you have a deadline and schedule."
The best ideas often come to Apple designers in their downtime, he says, and it might take them years before their designs even take off. Kawano says designers are always experimenting with their ideas and merging them with other people's work to see if they have potential. But don't expect to find a top-secret library of ideas. Kawano says the library is inside their heads as people knew what others are working on and are comfortable sharing their own ideas with their co-workers.
Finally, Kawano talks about a myth central to Apple's brand: Was Steve Jobs truly as frighteningly passionate as he was depicted? He wanted the "best thing," Kawano says.
"The reality is, the people who thrived at Apple were the people who welcomed that desire and passion to learn from working with Steve, and just really dedicated to the customer and the product. They were willing to give up their weekends and vacation time. And a lot of people who complained that it wasn't fair ... they didn't see the value of giving all that up versus trying to create the best product for the customer and then sacrificing everything personally to get there," he says.
Although Kawano says Jobs was "super demanding," he was also "super accessible." When asked if he ever got to interact with Jobs himself, or received praise or a piece of advice, he said:
"Nothing personally. The only thing that was really positive was, in the cafeteria one time, when he told me that the salmon I took looked really great, and he was going to get that."
