A Conversation With Robert Brunner, the Iconic Designer Behind Beats By Dre
Seven years ago, former Pentagram partner and Apple industrial design director Robert Brunner co-founded Ammunition, a new studio that aimed to give design the respect it deserved when crafting a product. Since then, the firm has produced iconic tech like the original Beats headphones, the recent Polaroid Cube, and, just announced today, the upcoming Leeo Smart Alert Nighlight, the first of Leeo’s planned smart home gadgets.
We had a chance to talk with Brunner about his work, his approach to design, and his ideas for the future.
Paste: How would you describe Ammunition’s general design philosophy?
Robert Brunner: Through my experiences working with these great organizations, I saw this rising importance of product design in the business community as being crucial to success. The reality is that we were getting some very valuable intellectual property and giving it away pretty cheaply. I wanted to build a company that worked in different business models that could actually participate in the success of the really interesting stuff we created. So I needed to build a multi-disciplinary approach to doing things. I came from the world of visual design, interactive design, and Matt [Rolandson] came from a world of user experience and brand strategy so it just made a lot of sense.
Paste: So you had this idea of valuing your own work a little more than you did in the past?
R.B.: I think that, myself included, other designers just focus on the notion of “I want to do something cool, work on something cool. Just do well enough financially that we feel okay.” That’s fine and that’s great, but I was seeing that design was becoming intellectual property and should be treated in the same way as someone writing software code or creating specific hardware. That’s what we’re about, making great things and shipping and delivering them. We’ve really built a reputation doing not just great work but great work that’s effective and actually happens.
Paste: How did you first get involved with Beats?
R.B.: I was introduced to Jim Iovine and Dr. Dre through a friend of a friend. They had this very specific belief that there was an audience and an entire young generation that was lost to the idea of great sound, being brought up listening to compressed audio through inexpensive earbuds. What they wanted to do was not just sell the higher end audio experience to their audience but also do it in a way that was tuned to their music. That was really important. Our secret weapon was we had two guys who actually created and produced a lot of the music helping us tune the products.
We began working closely with Jimmy and Dre. before there even was a Beats company organization. It was just those two guys. We began building that product and it turned out that we were right. Jimmy’s a smart enough businessman to notice that for his audience, there was no audio company that they were super fired up to be involved with. It certainly wasn’t Bose, it wasn’t Sony, and it wasn’t Sennheiser. So we helped build an enormous business that was eventually acquired by Apple for a huge sum of money. It was a nice validation of our work.
Paste: Could you say a little more about what the actual design process was like?