I absolutely love this article from Len Wilson:
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”
- Steve Jobs
I re-read this several times in the Steve Jobs biography to fully absorb it. I even trimmed it down a bit to this:
“Design is not the veneer but the soul of a creation, expressed in successive outer layers.”
In other words, most dismiss design as the icing of a core object or idea. A sweet but inessential finish. As the biography points out, in most other companies, engineering drives design. Those who make the product determine what the product will do first, then base its design on its features. They employ an outside-in approach. read more
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