I don’t know why but considered himself an artist, and many (including this morning’s editorial in the WSJ) did as well. I can’t find his quote but it was something along the lines that I’m a half artist, half businessman. He was an industrial designer, OK? Are such animals artists? I dunno. One renowned designer of signs, placards, posters, wine labels, book covers, and menus, among other practical things, protested against being called an artist, saying he was an illustrator.
“He was an industrial designer, OK? Are such animals artists? I dunno. One renowned designer of signs, placards, posters, wine labels, book covers, and menus, among other practical things, protested against being called an artist, saying he was an illustrator.”
Here we get into the vagaries of the word itself. You have to one side masters of high art like Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Michelangelo, which he clearly was not. But we also call carpenters artists, because they ply their craft as experts. Jobs was an artist in that sense, though I wouldn’t say his expertise was in design, a craft closer to high art than others, as such. I don’t actually know how closely he was involved in that process. But I do know that for the computer world, that sort of thing is the result of code, and that Jobs didn’t write code.
He was an idea man, and his ideas may have been the most perfeclty precise of any that a non-programmer could ever dream, without being an actual programmer. But still there’s that divide. Shakespeare could have had the plot, themes, characterizations, etc., of “Hamlet” explained to him in detail, but he had to actually write it. And the artistry is in the writing.
If Jobs was an artist, it was as a dreamer. A visionary, a guru, a seer. Someone who could see where the market was headed. Moreover, as an administrator. Not the sort of administrator who works as efficiently as possible, squeezing every last bit out of every last penny; I don’t think Apple even had a budget in its early years. No, he bossed via motivation. Surrounded himself with the highest talent and ran them like a slave driver with the whip of belief. Belief in himself, his ideas. It was a cult of personality.
Are cult leaders, even of the religion of technology, artists? Probably not.
I'm not sure that artist is the right term, but he had taste. Some people do, and when you see what they specify, you realize the rightness of it.So maybe the people who worked for him were artists, or at least "illustrators" - but someone has to recognize their talent and has to judge when those artists have accomplished a design which suits the function. Otherwise you would go off half-cocked, with the first thing the artist came up with - or you might keep on redoing the design and never commit to an actual product until the opportunity for selling the product was gone.
What Jobs did was to foresee what technological functions would sell, and discern when he had a design which provided those functions in a package which he could sell. And sell. And sell.