Myths About Apple Design ⇥ fastcodesign.com

Fast Company’s Mark Wilson interviewed former Apple designer and evangelist Mark Kawano. A portion of that interview has been distilled down to clarifying four common myths about Apple, particularly their design process:

It has often been said that good design needs to start at the top–that the CEO needs to care about design as much as the designers themselves. People often observe that Steve Jobs brought this structure to Apple. But the reason that structure works isn’t because of a top-down mandate. It’s an all around mandate. Everyone cares.

The next paragraph is a quote from Kawano:

“It’s not this thing where you get some special wings or superpowers when you enter Cupertino. It’s that you now have an organization where you can spend your time designing products, instead of having to fight for your seat at the table, or get frustrated when the better design is passed over by an engineering manager who just wants to optimize for bug fixing. All of those things are what other designers at other companies have to spend a majority of their time doing. At Apple, it’s kind of expected that experience is really important.”