While in mentioning about Apple, everyone of us will think of the amazing products shipped out by Apple such as iPhone and iPad. We are all impressed by its smooth design and handy user experience. But as a outsider do you know the story behind the amazing design of Apple? Apple has a team of world class designers and they are leading the fashion of design. What's the life in Apple's design team?
Ben Williamson from Apple shared one story of him which can give us some hints on what the life is like in Apple's design team. The life there is cool but it also put stringent requirement on the design. Perfect is the only thing they accept. Here is the story.
My first notable experience was after implementing a static design (done in photoshop) and presenting a working HTML5 / JavaScript demo to the stakeholders on the big screen in a presentation room. I was pretty pleased with the progress I had made, especially since I had only been working on it for 10 days and had a fully functional demo to show. It was pixel perfect as far as I could tell, and the demo was flawless. After I had gone thru the working demo a little scandanavian guy sitting at the very back of the room spoke up. . . "Flip back to the second screen you demoed . . . " A bit perplexed, I did as he asked not sure what to expect." The list item alignment on the left is off by a pixel" The first thought I has was "No fucking way . . . this guy is sitting at the very back of the room, no way could he possibly spot that." He asked me to pull up my pixel ruler and compare it to the PSD comp . . . sure enough, he was right. I was off by a single fucking pixel, and he caught it.
Perfect matters at Apple. Even if there is one pixel difference and most people may not notice it, but the designers know it and know it is not acceptable. There is a well known saying at Apple called "Apple Way" which in Steve Jobs team means "We don't ship shit, if you're responsible for shit going out the door and I find out, then it means your ass." It's because of this "Apple Way" drive's the growth and innovation of Apple. With this, we can expect more amazing products labelled with Apple in the near future.
Actually other companies or people can learn the course from Apple's design. Good is not enough, perfect should be pursued.
