Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences

Apple has made design cool. They see design as a tool for creating beautiful experiences that surprise and delight, while they also convey a point of view down to the smallest detail, from the tactile feedback of a keyboard to the out-of-the-box experience of an iPhone package. Steve Jobs set the standard that all products should be "insanely great." This is no accident; design is infused in the culture at Apple.    

The Apple organization understands how to create a hunger in customers and has received the envy of businesses around the world. John Edson, a lecturer on design at Stanford University and President of LUNAR, a leading global firm based in Silicon Valley whose clients include Apple, HP, Cisco and dozens of startups believes that companies should approach design just like Apple.

His new book, Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences uncovers lessons from Apple's method for product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience. Readers will learn how design can increase their competitive advantage by delivering beauty, ingenuity, and charisma.

Edson explains, “Much of what you will read here is based on the insights and experiences gleaned from my involvement in the design world, working with many different clients, as well as my experiences interacting directly with Apple and interviews with Apple veterans and industry leaders in design and technology.”

Design Like Apple offers the following seven principles for CEOs, managers and designers alike, so they can begin creating great products, services and experiences:

• One: Design Makes All The Difference - Beauty, ingenuity, and charisma create a unique competitive advantage
• Two: Design The Organization - Nurture taste, talent, and a design culture
• Three: The Product Is The Marketing - Great products sell themselves
• Four: Design Is Systems Thinking - Product and context are one
• Five: Design Out Loud - Prototype to perfection
• Six: Design Is For People - Connect with your customer
• Seven: Design with Conviction - Commit to a unique voice

Readers will also receive guidance on how to nurture taste, talent, and build a culture of design at every level of an organization. It’s about helping employees zoom out to view the big picture, see the relationships between objects and the space around them, and understand a product's context so they can design a compelling and infinitely useful system for customers.

John Edson’s motivation in writing Design Like Apple is simple, “to help business people codify the advice we provide to our clients every day and to help designers understand how to broaden their roles inside business.”

When asked why he wrote this book, Edson replies, “I wrote this book to champion design and to encourage everyone in an organization to appreciate the power of design and to use it as Steve Jobs did at Apple, to create “insanely great” products and attain outrageous business results.”

Edson acknowledges that Apple is successful not for who Steve Jobs was, but rather because he positioned design at the center of the organization.  Bridging creativity and commerce, Design Like Apple shows readers in all fields how to become the Apple of their industry.

Read an excerpt here.