How does Apple come up with their designs?

They pay a lot of very talented people a lot of money. They do a lot of research on currently available designs (user testing) as well as possible future designs. Most of their changes are small and incremental as they understand what the user wants. They rarely design a brand new computer from the ground up anymroe. Other than that, Apple are very secretive about their design process.

Meet Jonathan Ive.

Wired Magazine also interviewed Ive back in ‘05 and he explained some of his design experiences with the Power Mac G5 tower.

there is a ‘behind the scenes’ design guru at Apple’s headquarter. Johnny Ive. He recently came into the spotlight designing the pixar character eva. You beat me to it robmandu.

Also look for the upcoming film Objectified if you’re interested in industrial design.

I took one industrial design class, and we talked a lot about Johnny Ive, apparently he is a genius and apple barely does any user testing. It works for them, but not for most.

Brief but interesting article here.

I recently read an article relating to this topic. Yes, Jony Ive is their main man, but he gets his inspiration from Dieter Rams.

Here is the link to the article.

Thanks. I really appreciate everyone keeping this post going. I’m getting solid answers to this and my other Fluther questions.

Since you are still checking the answers . . .

watch a movie called Objectified. It goes into interesting detail about how designers come up with the designs for their products.

if you have netflix, it’s currently a “watch now,” option.

Don’t have Netflix, but will look for it at the Blockbuster, or just mooch off a friend that does have Netflix. Thanks a lot for the suggestion, it’s definitely something I’ll want to take a look at.