The chief designer behind Apple’s most iconic products, Jony Ive, in a new Wall Street Journal interview, reveals how his design philosophy guides collaborations at his design firm, LoveFrom.
Elisa Lipsky-Karasz for The Wall Street Journal:
Sir Jony Ive — as of 2012, the Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire — has his name on 1,628 U.S. patents, part of 14,000 he holds worldwide encompassing both software and hardware. During his time at Steve Jobs’s side, the designs that flowed from his pen spanned items as wide-ranging as Apple Store shopping bags, an oak display table and the company’s most-sold product, the iPhone. In Ive’s 55 years, he’s filled piles of sketchbooks with door handles, drills, landscape plans and AirPods, almost all with his trademark rounded corners, as though he wants to buffer the world against its harsher edges…
“I love making things that are profoundly useful,” he adds. “I’m a very practical craftsperson.”
[With the company since 1992], he toyed with the idea of leaving Apple. But then, on September 16, 1997, exactly 12 years after Steve Jobs had walked out the door to launch NeXT Inc., Jobs returned as CEO of Apple.
Ive, then 30, assumed Jobs would hire a more renowned designer to replace him, but something unexpected happened at their first meeting. “I clicked with Steve in a way that I had never before done with someone and never have since,” says Ive.
Soon the two were having near-daily lunches and Jobs was spending untold hours in the design studio, where he and Ive transformed ideas into tangible products, starting with the luminous turquoise iMac, launched in 1998. Jobs recognized that Ive’s design made something nerdy—a boxy desktop PC—into a symbol of carefree cool, an all-in-one design with a handle that made it more portable. The new iMac was a hit, and Apple went on to ship five million units by April 2001. The company was suddenly flush with success.
MacDailyNews Note: There’s much more in the full article here.
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“The chief designer behind Apple’s most iconic products…”, in word, bullshit. Is the iMac more iconic than the Apple ][? No. Is the iMac more iconic than the original Mac? No. The list goes on. Yes, Ive did some great designs and helped Apple recover from the dark days, but as time progressed he became much more obsessed with the look of things than in the functionality. At that point he had to go.
Jobs was close to Ive to keep his flight of fancy in check and to steer him and, once Jobs died, Ive took design to a torturous level.