apple park for several years now, this has been the place where all presentations of apple bites products have taken place. Tim Cook inaugurated it in memory of his late friend, Steve Jobs, who actively participated before his departure in the realization of the architectural as well as the functional aspects. Apple Park is one of a kind with a totally impactless structure and above all circular in shape like a huge spaceship of yesteryear.
If externally, Apple Park is visible to all here are the offices and above all the internal laboratories have never been visited or shown to the public. Never before, since thanks to colleagues from Wallpaper and the entire Apple design development team, it is now possible to discover some places where the aesthetic aspects are decided on a daily basis and not only of the Apple products of the future. A truly special journey with never-before-seen footage of the design development team at work on prototype iPhones, Apple Watch and even Macs.
Apple Park: here are the exclusive images of the design laboratories
Wallpaper had the opportunity to take this trip to Apple Park with Evans Hankey, vice president of industrial design at Apple, and Alan Dye, vice president of user interface design. Both close to Jony Ive, who we remember was at the head of this working group until 2019. And precisely on this point Evans wanted to recall what Apple has done and all that remains to be done. TO DO.
“We care about making great products, but we’ve worked just as hard to build a great team and a great culture. A lot of that comes from the beginning. Steve defined Apple by design. a veneer. It’s not how things look, it’s how things work. After three years [ad Apple Park]we couldn’t believe more in the vision of having a central design team for all Apple products.”
In this case, it is reiterated during the interview that it didn’t all happen overnight. Indeed, Evans confirms how “We knew very well that it was a huge opportunity, but we also knew that it had to be something more. We got to the point where we were a real team thanks to our past. It was a challenge, not a automatic victory. It took us a long time to try new things and get out of our comfort zones a bit.”
“From the beginning, Apple’s aesthetic ethos has defined the brand. Arguably, the company has done more to democratize the understanding and perception of design, both in its physical manifestation and as a means of shaping I Apple projects are everywhere in the world, but at no point has the quality of execution diminished. Instead, the rest of the world has had to raise the bar to catch up. Certainly, there is had occasional missteps, and while those may have triggered some internal soul-searching, Apple is not a mea culpa public company. Learn, improve, and move forward.”
And according to the leaders, Apple has always introduced new product categories with great humility. He did it with his entry into the world of smartwatches with the Apple Watch or with the AirPods wireless headphones that have now gone down in history.
“While key products like the Apple Watch and AirPods may seem effortless and fully formed from the outset, the work behind the scenes has been astounding (…). When AirPods development began ten years ago, the human factors researcher Kristi Bauerly found herself doing incredibly complex research on the human ear. We modeled and scanned the ears, worked with nearby academics, focusing on the outside of the ears for the best earphone design. And inside the ears for acoustics. Thousands of ears were scanned and it was only by putting them together that the company found the “design space” in which to work. I think we’ve put together one of the biggest libraries of ears. The database is the starting point of the project“.
However, the team does not resolve issues related solely and exclusively to products. Problems also need to be solved connected to unboxing and regarding sales packages. And so here the whole design team had to deal with the shrink wrap problem of iPhone packaging that users would remove easily and without wasting valuable time to the detriment of seeing their new product in their hands.
And there is photos of prototypes of the upper part of the iPhone where the photographic sector resides. Here, a member of Apple’s design team demonstrates how more and more models of the new product are being created by assembling camera lenses with rings of different colors, thicknesses, and constructions.
And not just because lettering, i.e. typographic characters, is also fundamental at Apple which are chosen to be inserted in the graphical interface of the products or in the devices or in their sales packaging. New York, the system serif font, was introduced in 2019 and has similar functionality to San Francisco, another font used by Apple. Both are available to Apple’s developer community, with their own built-in typographic guidelines that help maintain visual consistency and define branding.
The interview offers important passages in the Apple’s photographic revolution, in the development of Apple Watches and also how Apple Park is transforming business life. You can read the interview complete hereas well as take a look at all the photos available.