Keep It Simple

Keep It Simple is a book on Apple's early industrial design that I translated into Chinese at the invitation of Frog Design, on Apple's behalf.

I took the project on while I was still a design evangelist at Microsoft. It dragged on for a long time, and I only finished and shipped it during an extended stretch of free time after I'd left.

It's a book heavy on images, light on text — but the text isn't trivial. To translate it well you needed real depth on Apple's early devices, on the relationship between Frog Design and Steve Jobs, and on how Apple's product line evolved over time. There was no AI then; the only path was to already know the subject cold.

Translating it left a deep mark on me. It hardened a conviction I've carried ever since: software does not exist apart from hardware. Only when hardware and software advance together — and become inseparable in practice — does the user receive the kind of quiet, invisible goodness we're really after.