I recently came across Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by former software engineer Ken Kocienda. It was in one of my social media feeds, and since I’m interested in Apple, the creative process, and having been at Apple at that time, I was curious.

I began reading the book Saturday evening and finished it Tuesday morning. It was an easy read, as I was already familiar with many of the players mentioned and nearly all the technologies and concepts. But, I’d done something I hadn’t done in a long time—I devoured the book.

Ultimately this book gave more color and structure to what I’d already known, based on my time at Apple and my own interactions with him. Steve Jobs was the ultimate creative director who could inspire, choose, and direct work. 

Kocienda describes a nondescript conference room called Diplomacy in Infinite Loop 1 (IL1), the first building at Apple’s then main campus. This was the setting for an hours-long meeting where Steve held court with his lieutenants. Their team members would wait nervously outside the room and get called in one by one to show their in-progress work. In Kocienda’s case, he describes a scene where he showed Steve the iPad software keyboard for the first time. He presented one solution that allowed the user to choose from two layouts: more keys but smaller keys or fewer keys but bigger. Steve asked which Kocienda liked better, and he said the bigger keys, and that was decided.

I have been a Mac user since 1985, when I was in the seventh grade. For months I lusted after the Mac on display at Computerland on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. I'd go there after school just to play with MacPaint. It simply captured my imagination. Finally, after many weeks of begging, I got my dad to buy me a 512K Mac. Thus began my love affair with Apple.

Imagine how lucky I felt when I actually began working on the brand and on Pixar in 2001-2002. It was such a privilege to be so close to the magic and to Steve Jobs himself.

The Steve Jobs I knew was human. Not a god. Not someone who could distort reality. Just a man.

But he was sharp and always focused with his opinions and observations. He demanded perfection. Always.

With everyone sharing their sweet Steve moments, I have to share mine.

I was working at Apple in the motion graphics group within the Graphic Design department. I was assigned to work on the intro animation for the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther setup assistant. We went through the normal design process with our stakeholders (people in charge of “MacBuddy”) and got to an animation that was essentially swarms of dots that formed each of the different translations of “Welcome” on the screen. And then we showed this nearly-final animation to someone higher at the top—forgive me, I’ve forgotten who this was—and he killed it because the dots looked too much like sperm. OK, they kinda did. (Think about swirling points of light but with motion trails. We tried increasing the motion blur, but it was no use.)

It was back to the drawing board and I presented more ideas. Eventually, Steve got involved and started looking at the animations. Each week my boss would show Steve a new revision of it, and each time we got a little closer. Then on Round 14, the week my boss was on vacation, I had to go present it to Steve Jobs.

He was eager to see this new revision. No pleasantries. No introductions (actually he knew me from Pixar). Just got right down to business. But he did say this to me, “Wow. We spend more time on MacBuddy than Microsoft does on all of its UI.” And then he chuckled.