How a line drawing inspired a trillion dollar brand
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”
Most of us remember this famous Steve Jobs quote from the hit Apple commercial, superimposed over clips of iconic history makers of the past decade. The video often makes a resurgence every time someone wants to inspire innovative thinking somewhere, most recently at a company event.
What’s fascinating about the video, is a small segment where we see Pablo Picasso painting a bull on a glass panel. While there isn’t anything very complex about the painting, there is a profound elegance in it’s simplicity. This speaks volumes of the skill of the great master; his ability to distill the very essence of his subject to a few brush strokes.
Surprisingly, this video isn’t the only connection between Picasso, the bull, and Apple.
Apple is predominantly known for having remarkable packaging; bundling high performing computing into elegant designs. Most of these designs are culmination of hundreds of thousands of hours of iterative design and review. One might call Apple a design house that dabbles in engineering, but as of recently that is not the case.
The relationship between Picasso and Apple go beyond just a 3 second clip in an advert. The company’s in house training facility heavily draws inspiration from the Picasso’s Le Taureau (the Bull), a series of 11 lithographs.
Apple University, set up in 2008, serves as a facility to train employees about Apple’s products and culture (and how to think like Apple), led by the former dean of the Yale School of Management, Joel Podolny. Much about the school is shrouded in secrecy, with employees hardly talking about the content of the curriculum, nor any photos of the insides being publicly available. What little is known speaks volumes about the company’s dedication to their craft, with courses apparently packaged in the same meticulous manner as their products.
Courses are taught by academic heavyweights from MIT Sloan, Harvard, and Yale, alongside a pool of internal staff such as Tim Cook, and Pixar’s Randy Nelson.
The Bull
“In order to achieve his pure and linear rendering of the bull, he had to pass through all of the intermediary stages.”
The series, done with Fernand Mourlot, between December of 1945, to January of 1946, show a bull in transition from detailed realism, to abstract minimalism. Over the course of 11 iterations, Picasso takes the bull through a a transformation, removing components, highlighting contours, accentuating features. The design process was not linear either, as Mourlot later put it, he found the 3rd iteration too terrifying.
By the 11th panel, Picasso reduced the image to the very essence of the bull, capturing what the animal is in all but a few lines.
One would wonder why Picasso didn’t go straight to the 11th work or even question if a lot of work had been done into constructing a line art, but it was a crucial part of the process, allowing him to see what to leave, what to remove, and what to accentuate.
Communicating at Apple
“You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do.”
One of the courses at Apple University, taught by Randy Nelson (who was Dean of Pixar University) focuses on clear communication, and is rumored to have used Picasso’s lithographs to highlight the effort it takes to come up with something elegant, yet so simple.
This shows true from their copywriting to their product design, to the very packaging they ship their devices in; everything is meticulously (often over) designed.
What makes Apple, Apple
Another course spoken about, used a comparison of Google’s (initially) canned TV attempt with Sony, and AppleTV’s remote. This example exemplifies Picassos Le Taureau in another way; both remotes were designed for smart TV’s giving users the ability to do more. Apple’s is by far, a minimalist work of art, letting the TV box do the heavy lifting, out of sight and out of mind of the user.
Much like Picasso’s 11th lithograph, the design process that went into developing the Apple TV remote is fascinating. The essence of watching TV came down to three buttons; to play / pause, to go to the menu, and an ability to select something. The last one wasn’t even revolutionary, taking cues from the iPod shuffle.
Fascinatingly, if we look at the latest iterations of these remotes, its clear who set the benchmark for design.
References
Chen, B. (2014). Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style. The New York Times. 11 Aug.
Gibbs, S. (2014). Apple University: Where Employees Are Not born, but Made. The Guardian. [online] 11 Aug. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/11/apple-university-employees-staff-steve-jobs.
Haesaerts, P. (1949). Visit to Picasso. Eyeworks Belgium.
Mourlot, F. (1979). Gravé Dans Ma Mémoire. Paris: R. Laffont.
The Museum of Modern Art (2010). Pablo Picasso. the Bull (Le Taureau), State XI. January 17, 1946 | MoMA. [online] The Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63062 [Accessed 18 Jul. 2022].
Vanity Fair (2014). Apple’s Jonathan Ive in Conversation with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef69BUlge-A.
