How Steve Jobs brought skeuomorphism back to Apple in 1999

Although he gets most of the blame for it, skeuomorphism wasn’t really Scott Forstall’s fault. He was just following the orders of his boss and mentor, Steve Jobs. The man who gave the world the first skeumorphic consumer operating system, the Macintosh, loved computer interfaces with gaudy textures that made them look more like real-world things.

In fact, if it were not for Steve Jobs’s love of skeuomorphism, Apple’s design language might have been a lot flatter a lot earlier. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1999, the company was moving away from skeuomorphic design… but Jobs bought it back, with the famous brushed metal texture in the Quicktime app.

Over at Business Insider, Nicholas Carlson talks about how Steve Jobs was inspired by the brushed metal texture on a high-end Breitling watch for the Quicktime interface.
Here’s how the meeting between Steve Jobs and the Quicktime designers went down:

Jobs was very adamant that Quicktime “look like a real stereo,” says our source.
The team kept coming up with designs. Jobs hated them all.
“No, no, no, you just don’t get it!”
Then, one day, Jobs came into a meeting with the design team with a piece of paper in his hand. It was a ripped-out page from a magazine. It was an ad for a Breitling watch, which had a brushed bevel finish that Jobs really liked.
He put the ad on the table.
“Here,” he said, “Just make it look like that.”

When Apple introduced the brushed metal look to Apple, they warned developers from using it too indiscriminately. Of course, over time, Apple ignored its own warning, and Apple’s skeuomorphic design phase was back on in earnest. Thank god for Jony Ive, huh?