Edible Apple

Apple designer Louie Mantia announced this week via Twitter that in two weeks he’ll be leaving Apple to join the creative team at Square.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Square is an innovative mobile payment startup that was founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Here’s how it works: Square provides users a little dongle that attaches to an iPhone or iPad which then transforms the device into a mobile payment center capable of conducting credit card transactions. Apple itself is a fan of Square and even offers the dongle-based credit card reader through its online store; there’s also a deal in place to sell the dongle in Apple retail stores in the near future.

While at Apple, Mantia worked on icon and wallpaper design in addition to working on iTunes’ visual design. One of his more notable contributions was the controversial icon for iTunes 10 which Steve Jobs defended via email back in September of 2010.

Mantia’s departure shouldn’t raise any alarm bells as the highly regarded designer apparently just wanted to shift gears.

“Working at Apple has been awesome,” Mantia explained, “but I really need a change of pace. Super eager to work on something different!”

In a subsequent tweet, Mantia wrote:

My position at Apple in iTunes Design will be available soon, so if you are interested, send me a link to your portfolio!

Fleshing out the position a bit, Mantia then tweeted that the iTunes design team is specifically looking for visual designers.

In any event, 9to5Mac provides us with some illuminating details about Mantia’s background and how he came to work at Apple.

He joined Apple at a really young age, while he was just 21 and without a college degree. “I contacted them about a job and we scheduled interviews. I think this is how the hiring process works at most places”, he explained. He actually came via Iconfactory and prior to that Mantia had already made a name for himself in the Mac icon and iPhone development communities. Played Tap Tap Revenge, an addictive iPhone music game from Tapulous? Mantia was on the original development team. Obama ’08 app? Mantia did the user interface for that.

You can check out some of Mantia’s work over here and his iconfactory page over here.