“Designer Marc Newson is joining Apple as part of senior vice president of design Jonathan Ive’s team, the company told VF Daily on Friday,” Kia Makarechi reports for Vanity Fair.
“Newson, who will continue to be based in the United Kingdom, will be an employee of Apple, and will be frequently traveling to the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters,” Makarechi reports. “The industrial designer has had his work archived by MoMA, and has been commissioned by Ford, Nike, and Qantas Airways, among others.”
Apple’s Marc Newson (left) and Jony Ive“Ive and Newson, who have been close friends for years, have been spending time together over the past year. During that time, they have also worked on some designs for Apple,” Makarechi reports. “‘Marc is without question one of the most influential designers of this generation,’ Ive said in a statement provided to VF Daily. ‘He is extraordinarily talented. We are particularly excited to formalize our collaboration as we enjoy working together so much and have found our partnership so effective.'”
MacDailyNews Take: This sort of has the feel of inevitability about it, but it is, nonetheless, quite the bold coup! Now Apple has two of this era’s most accomplished designers working together. The sky’s the limit!
Jaeger-LeCoultre Atmos 561 clock by Marc NewsonBack in 2012, Chip Brown reported for The New York Times, “When Newson, 48, was a child and first began to exhibit the obsessive tendencies that characterize most great designers, he was entranced by the space-age utopia of the Jetsons, the early-1960s television cartoon about a family who zipped around in personal aerocars. Modernism and the idea of the future were synonymous with the romance of space travel and the exotic materials and processes of space technology. Newson’s streamlined aesthetic was influenced by his Jetsonian vision of the future, a future that didn’t pan out and left him, years later, conceding ruefully that ‘the future isn’t futuristic anymore.'”
The Zvezdochka, designed for Nike by Marc Newson“Newson’s career as arguably the most influential industrial designer of his generation and the leading exponent of the so-called design-art movement may stand as much on the quasi-moral power of design to affirm the social virtues of wit, proportion, elegance and simplicity, as on his obsession with futuristic forms and modernist aesthetics. Not that he has any overt agenda as a design evangelist. His motivation, apart from the business of it all, is the spirit of personal discovery, not civic edification. Each project is a fresh encounter with the material world,” Brown reported. “As a practical matter it’s easier to list what Marc Newson hasn’t designed than what he has.”
Lockheed Lounge by Marc Newson“Newson’s lifeline on the road when he’s traveling two weeks per month is an iPhone 4S. What gratifies him about the success of Apple products, beyond the fact that the Apple design chief, Jonathan Ive, is one of his best friends, is that it has vindicated the value of design,” Brown reported. “‘I think Marc is fairly peerless now,’ said Jonathan Ive, who met Newson 15 years ago in Japan. ‘Marc’s forms are often imitated, but what other designers seldom imitate is his preoccupation with materials and processes. You have to start with an understanding of the material. Often your innovation is just coming up with a new way to use material.'”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “David G.,” “Dan K.,” and “Chris Renaldi” for the heads up.]
