Design Digest #09

Design Swedishness & Industrial Design at Apple

Welcome to the 9th edition of the Ideas on Design Digest! This time we’ll discuss a bit of Apple and Swedish Design. Last time, I covered several design topics related to the Olympics. If you missed that, you can read it here.

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Apple is becoming boring. 

I bet this statement doesn’t shock some of you anymore, but it saddens me. With every Apple product event, including the one that happened a couple of weeks ago, I get the feeling that they keep hyping reissues of old devices with minor engineering and software improvements. Year over year, over year. It’s as if, since Steve left the room, industrial design at Apple was stripped out of its soul.

Apple Vision Pro gave me a glimmer of hope, but when it comes to their most important product lines, design innovation and experimentation is rather coming from companies other than Apple, and that’s sad. Maybe they’ve reached the pinnacle of design maturity where there is nothing left to explore except for miniaturisation. Or maybe this is all due to the design leadership vacuum left by Jony Ive after he quit in 2019; the turnover in the design group has been constant for the past 5 years.  

Personally, I wish that Apple, despite being an American company, would embrace a bit of design Swedishness: a mixture of Volvo’s reliability and the creative guts of Teenage Engineering. That would be something.

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Other things on my mind:

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Inside Design at Teenage Engineering

The Swedish Teenage Engineering is one of my favourite companies for industrial design. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of design and technology in their own products, as well as in collaborations with popular brands like Nothing, Ikea, or Google. In this interview, Teenage Engineering's David Möllerstedt shares some insight into their design philosophy.

→ Read the Interview

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Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in His Own Words 

Steve Jobs said a lot of thoughtful stuff, but I constantly see quotes being misattributed to him, as is the case of the "Here’s to the Crazy Ones" manifesto at the centre of the iconic "Think Different" campaign developed in the 90’s. Fun fact: he initially hated it.

As Laurene Powell Jobs puts it in the introduction of the free (!) online book Make Something Beautiful, "The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. And the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life".

And that’s exactly what this book (link below) is: the definite source for all the things Steve Jobs actually said and wrote. I recommend using the navigation to the right; it is such a well designed detail.

→ Read online book

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CMF Phone 1 by Nothing

Design wise, the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing is by far more interesting than many flagship phones currently on the market. It’s worth mentioning that the design vision for Nothing was defined in collaboration with Teenage Engineering.

What I like the most about it, besides the price – this thing goes for $199 – is how playful it is. You can swap covers, attach lanyards, kickstands, among other accessories. They even encourage users to design and 3D print their own custom accessories. Fun, right? And that's exactly what Nothing's vision is all about: Making tech fun again.

→ More about the CMF Phone 1

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Polestar branding by Stockholm Design Lab

Polestar started in 1996 as a racing team with purpose-built Volvo cars and later became an official performance partner to the Volvo Cars brand. In 2015, it was fully acquired by Volvo Cars and became its own standalone brand of electric luxury cars.

In 2017, Stockholm Design Lab was approached to evolve its visual identity and help establish Polestar as a credible brand. The project is already some years old, but I really really like it, especially the neutral palette with the orange accents.

→ See project

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Jony Ive Reinvents the Button

After leaving Apple in 2019, ex-Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, along with Marc Newson, founded LoveFrom, a design collective. Since then, they have partnered with companies such as Airbnb and Ferrari, they have created a unique typeface, royal badges and seals, a limited edition record player, and are now reinventing the Button in a collaboration with Moncler. As covered by Fast Company, the new button design, reminiscent of an AirTag, is the star of the multi-piece collection, making it possible to combine the different pieces together. 

→ Read article

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Job Picks of the Month

And before I leave you, here are some interesting open positions I found this month:

5AM - UX/UI Designer (Hamburg - Remote)
Agentur Loop - Digital Brand Designer (Salzburg - Vienna - Berlin)
Figma - Design Director, Enterprise (San Francisco - New York)
Gharage - Head of Creative and Strategy (Hamburg)
Substack - Enterprise Product Designer (San Francisco)
Substack - Product Designer (US - Remote)

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