I think people forget the affect of Steve Jobs being around and exposed to the world of Pixar talent, I know Scott Forstall get's all the credit here but context is important too, once I discovered this Pixar link, it made complete sense to the richness of the UI that macOS was capable of and allowed do when I got my eyes on it back around 2008.
When you think about how it looked beside Windose machines, at the time, just wow, being of that ilk it made total sense once I found that connection, there was a genuine feedback loop to the great benefit of mac users, but yes file it under Scott Forstall as maybe being the right medium and conduit to make it work with the OS's, so the credit is due, but we must relish how Pixar has had so many profound effects on so many areas and industries and the positive bridge into Apple via Jobs is of astounding value and deep legacy.
GFX designers, typeface people who train specifically for that arena, are a different skillset to animators, animators and that industry requires some serious top level talent, and they can and do engage in richness and huge amounts work and interactions of styles and so on, their core skills have to non-digital in origin, they are usually brilliant adaptable artists, in the true sense of that word.
I actually think this gave Steve jobs a way to creatively undermine his own sense of minimalism, or doing less with more as a broad rule and syngerise for optimal end product.
Computers have had such immediate affect on print/graphic design and industry that tbh if you are mid-level you can get away with greater execution output than in the past.
You might say the truly naturally brilliant artist's pre-computer, with illustration and artistic skills were also in that industry, but new media demands, like the growing animation indsutry sucked them over to that side as a general trend in industry and computers came and picked dup the slack and allowed mediocre peopel have a job, but pitch some designers against an animator in conceptual terms or raw skills, I do not think they will standup, they coudl re-skill up to that level, but you do not stand a chance in terms of analogue execution, basic hard skills.
To me if this guy was a packaging guy, it makes a lot of sense. Now the UI still retains the inputs of Pixar legacy with a more animately approach to how things move or happen, this is the art of the animation, able to put LIFE into something totally inanimate, but it has lost a lot of it, not all, the links still remains and many I think are harking back to that very human element that expressed more and more though the UI fore-shining, the hand of the caring creator was felt in the UX.
+ MOTION is another dimension - once you add that in, it's higher level design skill to pull of quality execution. It's so easy to add or make things move these days, the tech makes everything so much easier, but you have to have a very good motivation to do so IMHO, and "cool" does not cut it.
Some of us started pushing dirt around a page on the end of a piece of wood, a bit of chalk, or hard wax thing, hey even a bit of dirt off the ground. Later it became pixels.
