Picasso’s drawings of bulls inspired Apple’s famously simple designs
‘It takes a lot of hard work,’ Steve Jobs once said, ‘to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.’
He was referring, of course, to Apple and its notoriously rigorous design process. But he could just as easily have been describing a series of eleven lithographs created by Pablo Picasso between 1945 and ’46, collectively titled The Bull. Beginning with an artfully shaded, realistically rendered bull, and ending with a handful of lines that evoke the animal in the simplest possible terms, the series is a step-by-step example of how to break an image down into its most indispensable visual components.
These days, Apple incorporates Picasso’s bulls into its internal training programme. It’s become a sort of emblem for product designers in their quest for pared-down designs in the face of ever more complex devices.
