Influences

What shaped me.

I love what I do and do what I love. I’m obsessed with finding the truth of life in sublime, awe-inspiring beauty, the way nature is teaching us by example. Therefore, design is the center of my life.

My life and work have always defined what has been shaping me and vice-versa: while many events influenced me, I’ve shaped things in this world, too. For instance, I’ve been at Apple for a decade, helping to introduce the world to digital photo, video, and music editing applications, the look & feel of the first iPhone, a seamless mobile experience with iCloud, and other digital media breakthroughs that have become staples of our day-to-day lives. I owe a lot to my education at Art Center College of Design in in the arts and sciences, which helped me to become both tech-savvy and develop an obsession for details — a contemporary apprentice of Leonardo DaVinci (Renaissance Man) and a designer who has a profound respect for both the humanities (that studies all aspects of human society and culture) and scientists/engineers. I am an ambidextrous, left brain & right brain hybrid. While I was drawn to computers the moment I was introduced to them during my studies at Art Center, I’ve always focused on the Arts and Humanities. I learned early — via my mentor Paul Rand, that “[…] without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble for novelty. Without the aesthetic, the computer is a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance. Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.” For ten years, from concept to launch and multiple iterations, I have been overseeing Apple’s productivity and editing product suites, including Photos, Video and Audio — Aperture, FinalCut Pro X, and Logic, respectively, were frequently brought to key initiatives and projects, especially when they were still highly confidential projects — guarded with codenames and hidden in secret office locations only accessible with a badge. As product design lead and hiring manager of the professional applications design department, I oversaw visual interface and user experience design teams — long before UX became a term multi-disciplinary creative team that handled design, production, and engineering relations, as well as product marketing and packaging design. And while I never imagined this future when I started out as an undergraduate at Art Center College of Design, I arrived at ArtCenter (Europe) in Switzerland in the spring of 1992, ready to set an expansive agenda for my undergraduate education in a BA, Communication Design, with the goal for making sure that no matter what I’d do, it should become a yardstick of excellence.

I was particularly drawn to Art Center because it was one of the first design colleges to have a full academic program dedicated to an interdisciplinary, hands-on approach taught by successful professionals — the best in their respective fields. The classes I enrolled in combined traditional graphic design, Swiss typography, calligraphy, editorial design, branding, film, advertising, packaging design, industrial design, digital media, computer science, and -graphics. I graduated in Communication Design in 1995 and was awarded a 9th Term Honors focusing on digital media, and I sought electives in literature, film, psychology, and sociology. The integration of numerous disciplines has made me successful over the years, being able to bridge the tech world and the design world. After graduating from Art Center College of Design, I cofounded an Internet venture in 1998, which had been funded by a former, late CEO of Apple; eventually, after the DotCom bust in 2000 let, to call from Apple where I landed a role at the company’s newly founded, fledgling applications department headed by Sina Tamaddon at the time. At the time, Robert Kondrk and Will Stein, and also Sina were my most supportive mentors and managers. Dan Walker led the Apple University training that lasted weeks and was designed and exclusive for newly minted managers and leaders at Apple. I learned more at Apple than I ever could at any MFA program at the time. Under Kondrk, I helped introduce best practices and principles. I helped hire the department’s initial design talent that, under my and my peer’s leadership, launched many wildly successful products, including Emmy-award winning video editing ‘FinalCut Pro X,’ Grammy award-winning ‘Logic’ and ‘Garageband,’ the first ‘iPod,’ “.Mac.’ and others — breakthroughs that changed how people create, experience, and share photos, videos, and music. This kind of work helped make Apple the iconic company it is today. Tying together aesthetics, desires, art, and technology is what I continue to do. It’s extending that idea, so it becomes designing software that not only considers the content creator — the artist, the writer, the filmmaker, photographer, or the musician, but also the audience — in a meaningful and respectful way. In essence, the sum is larger than its parts.

Apple University

As part of my role at Apple, I was required to attend Apple’s internal management training program, led by Apple senior executives. Senior Vice President of Applications Sina Tamaddon and Apple’s Chief Talent Officer presided over Apple’s management training program at the time. The program was created to inculcate employees into Apple’s company culture and educate them about its history, mainly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses were mandatory for newly minted hiring managers or other executive leaders, which is why I was enrolled.

Apple’s drive can be seen in many of Apple’s endeavors today, including its product marketing and the design and ergonomics of its mouse and many other products “The Bull,” a series of 11 lithographs of a bull that Picasso created over about a month, starting in late 1945. In the early stages, the bull has a snout, shoulder shanks, and hooves, but over the iterations, those details vanish. The last image is a curvy stick figure still unmistakably a bull.

Mentors and Masters

Watch my film (a 1994 project) about Paul Rand visiting and touring in La Tour-de-Peilz in Vaud, Switzerland. Pictured: that’s me on the left with a terrible bowl cut. People who know me have witnessed that I’ve been having many a bad hair day.

I’ve been fortunate that I had the chance to learn firsthand from the late Paul Rand and his wife, Marion. I met Paul in 1994 when he toured our Swiss campus of the Art Center College of Design. Paul taught a class to some of the students. I had the honor to escort him around campus and film him. Eventually, he invited me to stay and work with him in his home and studio in Weston, Connecticut. If Paul would not pass away in 1996, I would have lived and stayed with him as his design apprentice for a while following my graduation from Art Center. Instead, when I asked him why he believed in me and my work, he tipped with his index finger on the tip of my nose and said: “…because you have the spirit!”

Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum; August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) was an American art director and graphic designer best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design.

New York Times
NYTimes Obituary
Wired
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