With Alan Dye departing for Meta and leaving a hollowed-out design division behind him, his replacement, Stephen Lemay, will have a rare opportunity to rebuild the company’s design culture from the inside out.
A bit of context
Jony Ive had a stellar tenure at Apple, and I love the man. But I think it’s fair to venture that his best ideas and decisions as the company’s design lead weren’t exactly the ones conceived during his latter years in Cupertino.
Still, while Ive is celebrated for the iconic designs of countless Apple products, perhaps one of his most overlooked works at the company was building a tight-knit core design team, and a strong sense of culture.
For years under his leadership, and particularly after he inherited human interface responsibilities following Scott Forstall’s ouster, the group remained remarkably stable, with almost no significant departures for years.
When Ive departed in 2019, it looked like he had left behind a well-oiled machine, with long-time alums in charge of hardware (Evans Hankey) and software (Alan Dye) design.
At first, they seemed to have enough fire and guts to the point of quickly undoing some of their boss’s previous decisions, and Apple’s overall design improved because of that.
But then, things quickly unraveled, starting with Evans Hankey’s departure in 2022. Since Apple had no one ready to take her place, the company simply extinguished her position and handed her responsibilities to then-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.
To make things even more surreal, Apple announced that its “design team will (…) transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year”, which he just did.
In the years that followed, Apple continued to lose hardware design talent, including Tang Tan, who currently works alongside Hankey (and many other former Apple designers) at Ive’s io product group within OpenAI.
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