Jef Raskin on icons

In 1979, as an employee at Apple, Jef Raskin started the MacIntosh project (he was also responsible for changing the name of the computer from the Annie to the MacIntosh because he thought it was sexist to name computers after women).

 
Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin, image from Mac History.


Although I'm pretty sure he was wrong about the mouse, I love what he had to say about icons.

[Jef] Raskin...like the idea of a bitmapped display and windows, but he was not as charmed by all the cute graphics and icons, and he absolutely detested the idea of using a point-and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. "Some of the people on the project became enamored of the quest to do everything with the mouse," he later groused. "Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There's a reason why humans invented phonetic languages." p111, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

From http://www.gentleface.com/free_icon_set.html

Jonathan Ive on simplicity

I love this quote from Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc—it's so applicable to any kind of art or design or writing or thinking or....

"Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. Its not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better was is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."
—Jonathan Ive, p343

Unattributed photo.

Steve Jobs on typography

This summer I've been reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, so I'm inspired to post some of the more interesting quotes regarding design that I've found.

Here's Steve Jobs talking about typography:

"The minute I dropped out [of Reed College] I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting," he said.

Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating."

...."If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them." (p41)

Devalued

Today, while I was out of the office, a thief got past the renters at BTD and stole the MacBook Pro I use for home, for interns, for mentees, and for additional mounties when deadlines demand.

While filing a police report, I learned that what cost me $2589.01 in 2008 (or, more accurately, $1918.87 because extra memory, protection, tax, and shipping don't count) is valued at under $1000. The NYPD pointed out that 2-year old technology is worthless. The only problem is that whatever the insurance company pays, replacing the laptop will be a financial challenge.

The computer isn't the only thing that got devalued today. I was the human version of aging technology by just not getting the way police reports work. My extreme amounts of information led to the officer to note that in giving monetary values, "we don't 'pad.'" Pad? Not happy, I pointed out that I'd never pad [not even iPad, alas!] anything. I was not the thief.

Now, my challenge is return to civility—and to replace the laptop which, to me, represents more time, energy, and expertise than what insurance decrees is worth under $1000.

—B.T., newbie complainant "reporter"