Splash No. 107 - Fruit Company

Fruit Company

I wonder if reading your own newsletters comes across as narcissistic like listening to your own music. If you walked in on a musician jamming to their own songs, it would seem a little bit conceited, but is it the same if you saw a journalist reading their own article? Either way, I was earlier (in a NON-conceited way). In the 2017 letter, I reflect on finishing my first design internship and the general feeling of accomplishment for having taken the first step towards my dream of becoming a real product designer. 

Here we are, three years later. After a year of actually becoming a real product designer at a great startup, I’m now a product designer at Apple. Last year, I made the decision to move to San Francisco without a job in place. Before I got there, I ended up finding a job with Fleetsmith through a connection of my brother’s. I already felt lucky to have found something that made me excited to go to work every day. I felt even luckier when I discovered that we’d been acquired by Apple! It feels surreal to suddenly be working for a company that people have heard of, and it will be an ongoing adjustment to realize that I have over 100k coworkers, instead of 70. Either way, I feel blessed to be in this position, achieving a dream that I never entertained because I thought it was too ambitious.

I didn’t really know what Apple was until Neil decided that he wanted an iPod Mini. We got a blue one. It was loaded up with music from all of our favorite artists, like Linkin Park and Smash Mouth. Even as a generally confused child, I was enamored with how easy it was to play my favorite songs, without having to lug around CDs and being able to rock those sweet white headphones like the colorful ads I saw plastered everywhere. 
When I later started playing games on my friends’ iPod Touch’s, I was thrilled to be able to touch a piece of software, which was appropriately designed to feel tactile. With each Apple product I managed to get my hands on, I was fascinated with how easy it was to use, and the attention to detail that I would later identify as a dedication to Dieter Rams’s principles of good design. Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is thorough down to the last detail. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Apple was always shaping my taste in software and hardware design that would make me want to be a designer in the first place.

Although I never really thought I would work from Apple, I saw this coming in a way. In the aforementioned newsletter, I ended with the statement, “I’m starting to understand that there is more possible than I can imagine when genuine interest aligns with effort.”

Maybe I was onto something.
 

Things are starting to feel normal again, but the fight against systemic racism continues. Reminders:
 

Ways you can help  

Anti-racism resources

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Yours,
Nikhil