think it could be done but let Suiter try.) Suiter’s organization survived Jobs’s departure (and Suiter’s). The organization also survived the long interregnum, and upon his return, Jobs developed a new partnership with creative director Hiroki Asai, who now manages Apple’s graphic design team.

As Jobs developed Macintosh, he forged close (but short-lived) partnerships with several designers—most notably, perhaps, with Susan Kare, who was responsible for the appearance of the original Macintosh UI. Unfortunately, the original Macintosh team disbanded soon after Jobs left Apple, though members of the team went on to make other significant contributions, such as HyperCard (Bill Atkinson) and Newton (Larry Tesler).

Very early on Jobs began a long partnership with Lee Clow, creative director at Chiat-Day, Apple’s advertising agency. Clow was the art director who collaborated on the famous 1984 commercial for the Macintosh with writer Steve Hayden. On Jobs’s return, Clow led the teams that created the iconic Think Different, iMac, and iPod campaigns.

In the early days, Apple outsourced most of its product design, principally to Frog. Jobs continued to outsource product design at Next. (Jobs left Apple in 1985; in 1989, Bob Brunner joined Apple, building a world-class, in-house product design team.)

Jobs’s later partnership with
Jonathan Ive (hired by Brunner)
is well known. What’s less well
known is how Jobs and Ive worked
together and how they worked with
the rest of the product development
team. We get this tantalizing clue
from Jonathan Ive: “Much of the
design process is a conversation, a
back-and-forth as we [Jobs and Ive]
walk around the tables and play
with the models” [ 1].

Other Leader-Designer Partnerships
While it may be “magic,” the leader-
designer-partnership model is not
unique to Apple. It’s an old pattern.
Well before Steve Jobs partnered
with Jonathan Ive, leader-designer
partnerships often led to great
things. At Pixar, co-founder Ed
Catmull has an extraordinary part-
nership with director John Lasseter.
(Exposure to their partnership had
to have had a profound effect on
Jobs.) At IBM, CEO Tom Watson Jr.
partnered with Eliot Noyes, who
in turn collaborated with Richard
Sapir, Paul Rand, and a host of
other great designers and archi-
tects, a story wonderfully chron-
icled in Bruce Gordon’s authorita-
tive monograph on Noyes [ 3]. At
Container Corporation, CEO Walter
Paepke partnered with Herbert
Bayer. Adriano Olivetti partnered
with Marcello Nizzoli. Artur and
Erwin Braun partnered with Dieter
Rams. At Herman Miller, CEO Max
Dupree partnered with George
Nelson, who in turn collaborated
with a host of great designers. At
CBS, CEO William Paley partnered
with William Golden, and Paley’s
successor, Frank Stanton, part-
nered with Golden’s successor, Lou
Dorfsman, illustrating that the
model can live beyond founders.

May + June 2012