When Pixar wanted to find a futuristic look for “Eve” the love interest for WALL-E, they turned to the one company in the bay area known for being on the bleeding edge of design.
“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology – no expense spared – and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”
Thankfully there is a close tie between Pixar and Apple… Steve Jobs.
A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”
Read more at CNNMoney’s Fortune magazine.