Ondrej Holzman A tall and kind American. That's how the British comedian and journalist Stephen Fry described Alan Dye, Apple's new vice president, who will manage the design of user interfaces. Dye rose to the new position after Jony Ive moved to the role of design director of the company.
Alan Dye joined Apple in 2006, but his previous professional life is also interesting. And even the story of how he got it. "He dreamed of being a professional basketball player," she described your guest on the podcast Design Matters writer and designer Debbie Millman, "but his love of writing and bad shooting led him to become a designer."
Dye then explained to Millman that his father had played a significant role. "I grew up in this incredibly creative family," recalls Dye. His father was a philosophy professor and his mother a high school education teacher, so "they were well equipped to raise a designer." Dye's father also worked as a carpenter and earned money as a photographer for his studies.
Practice in design and luxury
"I have childhood memories of my father and I creating in the workshop. Here he taught me about design and a lot of it had to do with procedures. "I remember him telling me 'measure twice, cut once,'" Dye recounted. When he graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in communication design, he definitely moved into the creative world.
He worked at the consulting firm Landor Associates, where he was a senior designer dealing with brands, went through the Brand Integration Group under Ogilvy & Mather, and also edited an episode as a design director at Kate Spade, a luxury women's clothing and accessories store.
Additionally, Alan Dye has worked as a freelance graphic designer with The New York Times, The New York Magazine, book publishers and others. He was known as a fast and reliable worker who received an article at 11 in the morning and delivered a finished illustration to him at 6 in the evening.
That is why, when he came to Apple in 2006, he received the title of "creative director" and joined the team that dealt with marketing and communication. He first drew attention to himself within the company when he became interested in the boxes in which Apple products are sold.
From boxes to watches
One of Dye's ideas was to have each corner of the boxes hand-dyed black to ensure they didn't reach customers scuffed and imperfect. "We wanted the box to be completely black, and this was the only way to get it," Dye told students at his alma mater in 2010. It was his sense of the smallest detail that earned him the attention of his superiors at Apple, and subsequently Dye was promoted to the head of the team dealing with the user interface.
His move from pure graphic design to user interface put him at the center of a group tasked with reshaping the existing mobile operating system. The result was iOS 7. Even then, Dye began to collaborate much more with Jony Ive, and after his significant participation in the development of iOS 7 and OS X Yosemite, he moved to work on the interface for the Apple Watch. According to Ive, the new vice president has "a genius for human interface design," which is why there's so much in the Watch system from Dye.
His brief description says a lot about what Alan Dye is like in the April profile to Wired: "Dye is much more Burberry than BlackBerry: with his hair deliberately brushed to the left and a Japanese pen clipped into his gingham shirt, he's certainly not one to neglect details."
His design philosophy is also well summed up in a short one essay, which he wrote for the American Institute of Graphic Arts:
Print may not be dead, but the tools we use to tell stories today are fundamentally different than they were just a few years ago. In other words, there are a lot of designers out there who know how to make a nice poster, but only a few of them will be successful in the months and years to come. They will be the ones who can tell a complex story across all media in a simple, clear and elegant way.
We can also relate this approach to Dye's career, as he went from designing iPhone cases to figuring out how we interact with iPhones and other Apple products. It seems that Ive has installed a guy very much like himself in the role of head of the user interface: a luxury designer, a perfectionist, and apparently also not at all self-centered. We'll definitely be hearing more about Alan Dye in the future.
Source: Cult Of Mac, The Next Web
Photos: Adrian Midgley
