Apple is not just among the world’s most valuable, influential and admired tech companies. It’s also very much a design company. Design has been a critical factor in Apple’s success, lodged deep in its corporate DNA. There were plenty of MP3 players, for example, when the iPod dropped. You can’t name one now because the look and feel of the iPod made a new thing — digital music — as intuitive and easy as familiar things.
The aesthetic Apple has embraced, from the design of its stores to the design of the Apple Watch, is now being celebrated in a new book — yes, a book on actual paper. It’s called Designed by Apple in California and it features 450 photos of Apple’s products through the years. Apple’s Chief Design Officer, the legendary Jony Ive, wrote the introduction to the book. In a statement Ive distills the entire idea behind Apple famous design aesthetic. Ive says:
“We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent, and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.”
