âDesign is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.â
Before Apple founder Steve Jobs made computers beautiful, digital design was not really taken seriously - it was an afterthought. His obsession with design started in a calligraphy class he took after dropping out of college. There, he fell in love with typefacesâhow they could feel human, emotional, expressive. Years later, that obsession changed everything. In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh. It wasnât just a computer, it was a design revolution. For the first time, people saw a graphical user interface instead of a command-line, terminal-like screen.
monospacing & proportional spacing
One of the biggest revolutions about the new interface was the way it rendered text. Apple developed a system for displaying fonts proportionally-spaced instead of mono-spaced, which was the standard back then. Mono fonts are fonts that give every single letter the same width - so an I has the same with as an O, which makes it seem very wide. Proportionally-spaced fonts made their letters obtain a dynamic width - so the font looks smoother and way more natural.
the whole thing was about usability
Jobs added five fonts to the system: San Francisco, Chicago, Monaco, New York, and Geneva. The interface was shaped by minimal, geometric formsâechoes of Bauhaus and the approach of âform follows function.â He didnât separate tech and design. He brought them together. Teams at Apple worked across disciplines, and Jobs made sure design wasnât just decoration, but the product. A brandâs identity, he believed, started with how it looked, felt, and worked. This mindset didnât just shape Apple. It pushed companies like Microsoft to take design seriously too, adding fonts and user-friendly interfaces of their own, like TrueType.
shifting the world of phones
The launch of the first iPhone in 2007 is a story on its own. While most phones still had physical keyboards, made out of plastic, the iPhone came with a glass touchscreen and a back made out of aluminum. It only featured a handful of buttons and the touchscreen was controlled with gestures. One year earlier, the best-selling phone was the Sony Ericsson W810i. The iPhone made it instantly feel outdated. Steve Jobs didnât just change how we use computersâhe changed how they look, feel, and fit into our lives. Digital design was never the same again.
