Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

world-class
cities!” The fonts were renamed 
Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Venice.
Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with typography. “His 
knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on having great ones,” Markkula 
recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important things to do?’” In fact the 
delightful assortment of Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-writer printing and great 
graphics capabilities, would help launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon for Apple’
s bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of regular folks, ranging from high school journalists to 
moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky joy of knowing about fonts, which was once 
reserved for printers, grizzled editors, and other ink-stained wretches.
Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash can for discarding files, that helped define 
graphical interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared an instinct for simplicity along 
with a desire to make the Mac whimsical. “He usually came in at the end of every day,” she said. 
“He’d always want to know what was new, and he’s always had good taste and a good sense for 
visual details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday morning, so Kare made it a point to be there 
working. Every now and then, she would run into a problem. He rejected one of her renderings of 
a rabbit, an icon for speeding up the mouse-click rate, saying that the furry creature looked “too 
gay.”
Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He had Atkinson 
and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their look. He did not like the ones on 
the Lisa because they were too black and harsh. He wanted the ones on the Mac to be smoother, to 
have pinstripes. “We must have gone through twenty different title bar designs before he was 
happy,” Atkinson recalled. At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them 
spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs 
erupted. “Can you imagine looking 
at that every day?” he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”
Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s design demands and control-freak tendencies. 
One of Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the garage, Espinosa had been convinced to 
drop out of Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he would always have a chance to study, but only 
one chance to work on the Mac. On his own, he decided to design a calculator for the computer. 
“We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting 
for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.
“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some 
lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Espinosa kept refining it in response to 
Jobs’s critiques, day after day, but with each iteration came new criticisms. So finally one 
afternoon, when Jobs came by, Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll 
Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and personalize the look of 
the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, the 
background, and other attributes. Instead of just laughing, Jobs plunged in and started to play 
around with the look to suit his tastes. After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His 
design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on the Mac and remained the standard for fifteen 
years.
Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language 
for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for 
Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-named Snow White, not because of 
his preference for the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the 
seven dwarfs. The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the 
look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him 
and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his 
Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.
Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene 
for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a 
“California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex 
appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar maxim that 
form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and 

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when Jobs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted 
immediately for the Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin 
grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that 
he move to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that 
handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.” 
Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign,
2
opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract 
to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration 
“Designed in California.”
From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that 
even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully. One of the most extreme—and 
telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board 
that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would 
ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. 
“But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”
One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s 
important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”
Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A 
great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s 
going to see it.” In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again 
reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of 
drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and 
nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on 
the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way 
through.”
From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation. People do 
judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept 
trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to redo it fifty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a 
member of the Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going to be thrown in the trash as 
soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this 
showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while they were trying 
to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs, each detail was essential to making the 
Macintosh amazing.
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a 
ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a 
Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each 
Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures 
were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs 
called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after 
all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in 
lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like 
this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.

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