There is no Dye in Apple’s design team

Steve Jobs said lots of things, so you’ll usually find a quote from him for almost every occasion. “Great things in business are never done by one person,” he once said. “They’re done by a team of people.”

News that Meta has poached Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of human interface design, inevitably focuses on the credentials of the poached party, but the former Jony Ive replacement never worked alone. He may have led the team, but his job, at least, reprising Jobs, was “to be a yardstick of quality,” to push his team to “excellence.”

Controversy concerning Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” UI continues, but only time will tell if this is about customers resisting changes they’ll come to love, or if the designers should have waited longer to get it right. Time — and user satisfaction surveys — will show the way.

Apple is more than one man

But it was never about Dye. It was about Apple’s design team — and it is notable just how many designers have quit Apple to join Meta, OpenAI, and LoveFrom under Dyes’ watch. To what extent was this exodus attributable to his leadership? We may never know.

All the same, now that there’s no Dye in Apple’s team, it is time to welcome his replacement: longitime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. You’ve probably not heard much about Lemay, but if you check his extensive collection of patent filings, you’ll discover he’s played a major part in Apple product designs for a long time — going back to the original iPhone. 

People who claim to know people say Lemay is highly respected across the company, and that he’s known for attention to detail and craftsmanship. Excellence also demands attention to detail. With this in mind, Daring Fireball writes: “The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true.” 

Love what you do

I’m not here to bury Dye or to praise him, but note his departure. His decision to move to Meta might have been driven by some surprise desire to work against the company that promoted him, could have been motivated by money, might even have been because he really likes glasses and wants to spend more time working on them. We can really only speculate. 

I do know that Jobs also said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Loving what you do matters. 

Dye’s decision to quit shows he had perhaps fallen out of love with what he did, despite his recent WWDC appearance evangelizing his team’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which  introduced jarring changes across Apple’s enduring app icons. 

It is also worth reflecting that people don’t usually make decisions to quit powerful roles such as leading design at the world’s most acclaimed tech company on a whim. So, it is possible he was considering quitting Cupertino even as he stood on the WWDC virtual stage. 

With that in mind, perhaps you could argue that Apple has effectively purged its system of an element that was no longer fully engaged?

Tomorrow belongs?

The result of Dye’s departure is that Apple has a new internally respected craftsman guiding its design team as it works to integrate AI within products it makes (with privacy in mind). There are important existential differences between Meta’s approach and Apple’s. 

For the future, we shall see how it goes for Dye’s leadership of his new team. That may well depend on which company sweats details most and which team goes beyond the sum of its parts. 

In the end, while one person can sometimes make a difference, despite the current cultural trend toward celebrating individuals, it takes a team to dent the universe. “Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday,” as Jobs once said.

I suspect Apple’s designers will continue to do just that, without Dye.

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