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

CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DESIGN
Real Artists Simplify
A Bauhaus Aesthetic
Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why they were so 
wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the masses. He also 
loved listening to his father describe the styling intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning 
at Apple, he believed that great industrial design—a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the 
Apple II—would set the company apart and make its products distinctive.
The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a small building it 
shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its signature style and memorable product 
designs, so Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. “He would come in looking 
scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who 
worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had 
hired Lewin.
His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981, when he began 
attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that year focused on 
Italian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo 
Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli. 
“I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in 
Breaking Away
reveres the Italian 
bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.”
In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus 
movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans serif font 
typography, and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his mentors Walter Gropius and 
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no distinction between fine art 
and applied industrial design. The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus 
taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. It emphasized rationality and 
functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and 
Gropius were “God is in the details” and “Less is more.” As with Eichler homes, the artistic 
sensibility was combined with the capability for mass production.
Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design 
conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” He predicted the 
passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current wave of industrial design is 
Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it,” he said. 
“It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed an alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that was 
more true to the function and nature of the products. “What we’re going to do is make the 
products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. 
We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like 
Braun does with its electronics.”
He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple. “We will make 
them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of 
black, black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached. “So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’
re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the 
product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” 
Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the 
ultimate sophistication.”

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Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to use. Those goals do 
not always go together. Sometimes a design can be so sleek and simple that a user finds it 
intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. “The main thing in our design is that we have to make 
things intuitively obvious,” Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For example, he extolled the 
desktop metaphor he was creating for the Macintosh. “People know how to deal with a desktop 
intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most 
important. People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on 
metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.”
Speaking at the same time as Jobs that Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller seminar room, 
was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted into fame the previous November when her 
Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. They struck up a close 
friendship, and Jobs invited her to visit Apple. “I came to work with Steve for a week,” Lin 
recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why do computers look like clunky TV sets? Why don’t you make 
something thin? Why not a flat laptop?’” Jobs replied that this was indeed his goal, as soon as the 
technology was ready.
At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial design, Jobs felt. 
He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and he also liked the furniture of Charles and 
Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter Rams. But there were no towering figures energizing 
the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy and Herbert Bayer had done. “There 
really wasn’t much going on in industrial design, particularly in Silicon Valley, and Steve was 
very eager to change that,” said Lin. “His design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful. 
He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided 
allowing that to make his products cold. They stayed fun. He’s passionate and super-serious about 
design, but at the same time there’s a sense of play.”
As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the Japanese style 
and began hanging out with its stars, such 
as Issey Miyake and I. M. Pei. His Buddhist training was a big influence. “I have always found 
Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular, to be aesthetically sublime,” he said. “The most 
sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture 
has produced, and it’s directly from Zen Buddhism.”