Steve Jobs on Simplicity and Design

Simple and High Quality: I buy my honey in bulk from local beekeepers.

---

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works... To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that... The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
- Wired, February 1996 

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end.”
- BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998 

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
- CNNMoney/ Fortune, January 24, 2000 

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”
- MSNBC and Newsweek interview, Oct. 14, 2006  

“John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place — which was making great computers for people to use.”
- Statement in The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program oral history, April 20, 1995

---

Steve Jobs followed the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. dictum "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."

And while many clothing vendors think the opposite is true - that complexity suggests not just value but actual luxury - I will stick with simple.

(In all fairness, my husband, Clark Aldrich, has always been a huge Steve Wozniak fan.)