Insanely Great — Steve Jobs on Design, Tested on My Own Work

In 2003, speaking to The New York Times Magazine, Steve Jobs drew the line designers still quote: design is not only what a thing looks like and feels like, it is how it works. It is usually repeated as a slogan. I read it as a test, and I read the principles around it the same way, not as a portrait of one man’s taste but as rules specific enough to fail. The ones that hold up are checked below against something on this site, because a principle you cannot point to in your own work is only a quotation.

Start with how it works. For months the custom cursor on this site did nothing at all, stopped by three independent faults, each one hiding the other two. The fix took minutes. The hover state took six versions, because works turned out to mean more than appears: a ring that takes the gradient of whatever ground it crosses has to be right on every ground, at every speed, on every page. None of those versions changed much in a screenshot. All of them changed how it behaves under a hand. That is the half of the line people skip. Looks are what you can review in a meeting; how it works is what you only find by using the thing until it fails.

Focusing is about saying no. Jobs said it in 1997, back at a company with too many products, and then cut the line down to four. The version here is smaller and just as literal. Medusa runs on five core colors where its source, jellyfish and deep-sea light, could have justified dozens, and in seven years no color has been picked by hand since. The navigation carries four words, and one that belongs there, Writings, waits until there are about six pieces worth the door. Finished work gets held back too, when it is not yet ready to stand beside the rest. Saying no to other people’s ideas is easy. The discipline is saying no to your own.

Start with the experience and work back to the technology. Jobs made that point the same year, answering a developer who had challenged him from the audience. On Glydways’ Metro Visual System it set the order of the whole project: wayfinding, scripts and accessibility were fixed before a single screen existed, so the vehicles, apps and kiosks that Lumasis later drew inherited a promise instead of negotiating one. Technology-first work asks what the stack can do and designs to fit. Experience-first work writes down what a rider has to be able to read, then makes the stack keep that promise.

Simple can be harder than complex, he told BusinessWeek in 1998: you have to work to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple. A Portrait is the proof I have. Its mechanism takes one sentence to describe — the photograph is never shown, only read, one luminance value per cell across a 140-by-140 grid, each value choosing the character that lands there. Getting to that sentence took years. The same principle reaches the parts nobody inspects. Jobs learned from his father to finish the back of a fence as carefully as the front. Here the back of the fence is the blackletter letter that sits in the navigation and never reaches an aria-label or a page title, the American spelling inside a downloaded filename, the data export with no preamble to break the spreadsheet it lands in. No visitor will check. That is exactly why it has to be right.

The last principle is the one he told least like a rule. After dropping out of Reed, Jobs sat in on a calligraphy class, serif and sans serif letterforms and the spacing between letters, with no idea what it was for. A decade later it became the typography of the first Macintosh. You can only connect the dots looking backward, he told Stanford’s graduates in 2005. I have kept writing systems for as long as I have kept journals, most of them scripts I cannot read, and for most of that time they were for nothing. Then they became the third plate of A Portrait: 2,324 characters across 69 writing systems. The blackletter in the navigation came from the same drawer. Insanely great was never a standard anyone could check, which is why it outlived the products it described. What can be checked are the rules underneath it. Borrowed, they are good advice. Held to your own work, with the evidence on the page, they become a system, and a system is the only form in which taste survives being handed to someone else.