Just when the search seemed fruitless, it turned into borderline farce. The Apple team went to see hotshot Swiss-born German designer Luigi Colani, one of Jony’s design heroes, who was famous for eccentric “biodynamic” designs of cars, motorcycles and consumer goods. After delivering a lecture at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Colani was asked a question about the future of keyboards and he launched into a long diatribe in which he compared keyboards to women’s bottoms. Since men like to grab women’s rears, he said, the keyboard should be split up the middle to accommodate different hand sizes. To illustrate his anatomical theory, he drew a woman’s bottom with keys on it and handed the sketch to one of Apple’s staff, who was almost too embarrassed to take it. Back at Apple HQ, the story spread, and one of the staffer’s colleagues brought in a female mannequin and stuck keys to it, replacing his regular keyboard. The stunt drew outrage from Apple’s female staff, but, remarkably, the idea remained and Apple’s computers soon had split ergonomic keyboards.2
While the upper management searched for a design genius, some of Apple’s product groups had been working closely with Bob Brunner at Lunar. The projects included some off-line blue-sky product explorations like the Juggernaut project that Jony later worked on. Reportedly, Lunar’s invoices classified the work as “product design,” which indicated engineering rather than industrial design. In light of the exclusive contract with Frog, Apple’s accounting department wouldn’t pay for any industrial design work unless the invoice was in Frog’s name and vendor number.
Meanwhile, as Apple’s relationship with Esslinger soured further, less and less work went his way. The billings dropped precipitously and eventually Apple stopped paying Frog’s retainer. At the same time, Esslinger was being pressured by Jobs to work at NeXT, which would violate Frog’s contract with Apple. Ultimately, Apple and Frog agreed to nullify their contract.
That put Apple in a difficult spot. The company had dumped its design firm and its search for a new one had been a bust. Only then did someone at Apple realize they had their superstar designer right under their noses. Brunner had been doing stellar work, and the company had been delighted with everything he’d worked on. More than that, Brunner was more involved than the typical outside contractor. He regularly attended design meetings, even those that weren’t directly involved in his own contract work, and he had been pushing Apple to mature Snow White and transition to a new, unified design language.
Apple started trying to recruit Brunner. They twice offered him the job of design director, but he wasn’t interested because Apple had no design organization. He felt the job would be a dead end.
“I didn’t want to work at a company that wasn’t designing its own stuff,” said Brunner. “I didn’t want to manage people doing the creative work; I wanted to dothe creative work.”3By 1989, Apple was getting desperate and tried again, this time asking Brunner, What would it take?
Brunner was tempted to take the offer. “Of all the companies in the world, this company could have a really amazing in-house design team,” he said. “It should have a really amazing studio. It has great products. A great brand. Great history.”
He made a pitch. Brunner told Apple that he wanted to build a team within the company and turn Apple into a world-class design company. But he didn’t want to build a big, sprawling design organization, which was typical of companies Apple’s size. He’d worked with some big brands and found that their design organizations were too big and multiarmed to do really creative work. Because they were big, they tended to be bureaucratic, another obstacle to good design.
Instead, Brunner wanted to re-create his small design agency, Lunar, within Apple. He wanted a “small, really tight” studio. “We would run it like a small consulting studio, but inside the company,” he said. “Small, effective, nimble, highly talented, great culture.”4
Setting up a consultancy inside Apple seemed in line with the company’s spirit: unconventional, idea driven, entrepreneurial. “It was because, really, I didn’t know any other way,” Brunner explained. “It wasn’t a flash of brilliance: that was the only thing I knew how to do.”
Apple agreed. Brunner, then thirty-two, joined the company as head of ID in January 1990. But the job wasn’t anything like he’d imagined. He was head of the design studio—and its only member. He was given a desk in the middle of the hardware department.
“I got there and it was, here’s your cubicle, in a sea of engineers. I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’”
Brunner’s Dream Team
Despite his intentions to build a dream team, about eighteen months passed before Brunner began hiring in earnest. He needed to make the case for more resources with Apple executives but, perhaps more important, he had to come up with a cool place for the designers to work.
“[The studio] was essential to recruiting talent,” Brunner said. “I can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.”5
Brunner found part of the answer in an underutilized building that Apple was leasing at 20730 Valley Green Drive. Called Valley Green II, or VGII, the building was a large, low-slung Spanish-style stucco structure surrounded by a few small trees and a big parking lot. Not far from Apple’s main campus, Valley Green Drive is on the other side of De Anza Boulevard, the main road through the center of Cupertino. Almost all of the buildings in the area are leased by Apple, making this part of Cupertino look like a company town. Apple’s first office, on Bandley Drive, is just around the corner.
Brunner took over half of the building, a big open space with twenty-five-foot-plus ceilings. He would share the building with Apple’s Creative Services group, known as Apple’s “In-House Design Consultants,” who were called on to produce things like brochures, manuals, in-store posters and displays and video promos.
Another crucial consideration for Brunner was that the building was not directly under the noses of Apple’s meddlesome executives. “I liked that it was off the beaten path.”
Brunner worked with Studios, a big San Francisco architecture and design firm, to transform the interior into an appealing design studio. Apple’s practice was to use standardized office furniture from Herman Miller, the company credited with inventing the cubicle, but Brunner didn’t assemble it into cubes. Instead, the desks were arranged in unusual formations around the space. “We used the taller structures as spines running around the studio and the work spaces running off it,” said Brunner. “The corporate planning people didn’t get it. They said you can’t do that, but that’s what we did, put it together in different ways. It totally freaked them out. It was great, a lot of fun. We just made it less oppressive.”
Brunner had a CAD workstation installed for creating 3-D models of designs along with a computer numeric controls (CNC) milling machine to turn the CAD models into foam ones and a paint shop for testing different colors.
“The ID studio at Apple was a cool work space,” recalled Rick English, a photographer who did a lot of work with Apple in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, English contributed photos to Kunkel’s book about the design group, AppleDesign, but he also worked with a lot of other design studios in the Valley. To his eye, Apple seemed different. It wasn’t just the tools and their focus; the place was rapidly populated with designer toys, too, including spendy bikes, skateboards, diving equipment, a movie projector and hundreds of films. “It fostered this really creative, take-a-risk atmosphere, which I didn’t see at other firms,” said English.6
When Brunner began recruiting in earnest, he initially found attracting talent difficult. Apple had no reputation for doing its own design, having outsourced it to Frog, and talented, ambitious designers were more inclined to go to firms with a strong creative history like the Bay Area’s IDEO.
To help with recruiting, Brunner took a leaf from Tangerine’s playbook and started promoting his work through design magazines. He created mock-ups of fantastical Apple products and ran big glossy photos of them on the back of I.D.magazine, the international design bible. One was a gigantic bicycle navigation computer that showed maps and local landmarks on a black-and-white screen. Another was a chunky wristwatch computer the size of a cantaloupe.
“They were concepts, not real products,” said Brunner. “They started to get attention. It was totally recruiting. No other reason. They were sketchy, information appliance models. A little bit tongue in cheek, but it served its purpose.”7
• • •
Over time, Brunner recruited a team of talented designers, some of whom would remain with Apple for decades and be responsible for a string of hit products, including the iPhone and iPad. Key members of Brunner’s team were Tim Parsey, Daniele De Iuliis, Lawrence Lam, Jay Meschter, Larry Barbera, Calvin Seid and Bart Andre.
Daniele De Iuliis (day-YOU-lease) was perhaps the most precocious of the group. Born in Bristol, United Kingdom, of Italian descent, De Iuliis was a graduate of the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. Brunner hired him in 1991 from the San Francisco office of design group ID Two (where Jony’s friend Clive Grinyer had earlier worked).
Brunner specifically wanted designers with experience in consulting. “After experiencing the inertia that exists inside Apple, Bob realized that by hiring former consultants he could operate with the speed and efficiency of a freelance group,” said Tim Parsey. “As a former consultant, Bob knew that we would think and act like consultants.”8
Fellow designer Barbera was impressed with De Iuliis’s personality right away: “Danny, in particular, gave off that weird light that other designers tend to notice. I took one look at him and figured that our work was gonna get a lot better, fast.”9
De Iuliis was able to imbue his designs with strong personality, a skill that served him well later on. One of his early projects was the Macintosh Color Classic, an update of the original Mac that exuded character and was avidly collected by fans for years. He would later work on the MacBook Pro and the iPhones 4 and 5. His name appears on more than 560 patents. They’re vast and varied in scope, including innovations in 3-D cameras, multi-touch displays, location tracking, RFID transponders, nitriding stainless steel, magsafe charging mechanisms, the iPod and improved speaker enclosures.
Later in his career, De Iuliis would receive top design awards for his work. Once Jony joined the team, the two developed a strong relationship. De Iuliis and Jony lived close to each other in San Francisco, and commuted together for more than twenty years.
In 1992, Brunner recruited Bartley K. Andre (known as Bart), a graduate of the University of California at Long Beach and an intern in Apple’s Personal Intelligent Electronics, or PIE group. He would emerge as one of the top five patent holders in the United States on a year-to-year basis (thanks to his last name, he is listed on all of Apple’s major patents in the title: “United States Patent Application Andre et al.”). By 2013, Andre had more patents to his name than any other Apple designer, including Jony. In 2009 alone, he received 92 patents; in 2010, his 114 set a record for an Apple designer. Most of the patent awards were for innovations on the phone, tablet and laptop lines.
Andre worked on everything at ID, from circuit modules to RFID systems. He was credited with the design of Apple’s 035 design prototype of the first iPad, according to information released during the Apple v. Samsungtrial in 2012. Along with other members of the team, he several times received the prestigious Red Dot Award, from Germany’s Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen institute.
Daniel J. Coster joined the team after Jony, arriving in June 1994. Described as “tall, goofy [and] super-talented,” Coster had earned an ID degree from the Wellington Polytechnic School in New Zealand in 1986. Initially hired on a three-month contract, he impressed the group with work on colors and finishes for the Newton portable, then was hired full time. He designed various towers and gained notice for being the lead designer of the Bondi Blue iMac. Like his coworkers, Coster rapidly accumulated patents, receiving nearly six hundred working for Apple over the last two decades. In 2012, Coster was inducted into his alma mater’s design Hall of Fame for “an outstanding contribution to New Zealand’s economy, reputation and national identity through art and design.”10
When Jony joined the team, his arrival was much anticipated. “Bob knew the effect that a strong new designer would have on the group,” said Meschter. “When Daniele De Iuliis and Tim Parsey first arrived, our whole approach to design changed. But when Jonathan came on board . . . the group really took off.”11
• • •
To run the group like an outside consultancy but within Apple, Brunner set up a loose management structure that largely persists today. The designers always worked together on whatever project the group was working on. “We’d work on multiple projects, and move from project to project, pretty much the way he [Jony] does it today,” Brunner explained.12
Brunner also made about half a dozen of the designers “product line leaders” (PLLs) for Apple’s major product groups: CPUs, printers, monitors and so on. The PLLs acted as liaisons between the design group and the company, much in the way an outside design consultancy would operate. “The product groups felt there was a contact within the design group,” Brunner said. “They managed the communication and the different needs of each group. I didn’t know any better. I ran it like the Lunar studio. There’d be discussion of a project. We’d design it, make it and ship it.”13
As Apple grew and thrived, riding the desktop publishing revolution and the exploding market for PCs, the group found itself with a massive workload. “We had an enormous number of products in the pipeline,” said Brunner. “Two lines of desktops, monitors, printers, mobile products. Way too many. It was an enormous amount of work. More than we could handle.”
The production schedules also got shorter and shorter. When Brunner first started at Apple, the product development cycle was eighteen months or more. “It was crazy generous,” Brunner said. “You had an amazing amount of time to make something work.” Within a couple of years, however, the product development cycle shrank to twelve months, then nine, and sometimes even six months if the product was needed in a hurry.
“All of a sudden, what got compressed was our thinking time,” Brunner said. “It still took just as long to implement something, but the time to explore, to test and to play with, just went away.”
