Jony Ive is the head of design at Apple and is responsible for the designs of iconic products like the iMac, iPad, and Apple Watch. He has a calming presence and is described as a very nice guy from London with a passion for design and making things himself. Ive has a close working relationship with the late Steve Jobs, who referred to Ive as his "spiritual partner," and the two worked closely together to revolutionize product design and make Apple the most successful technology company in the world. Ive leads a small design team at Apple's secretive design studio and is obsessively devoted to creating innovative, easy to use products through an emphasis on pure ideas over focus groups.
Original Description:
A Rare Look at Design Genius Jony Ive: The Man Behind the Apple Watch
A Vogue article
Original Title
A Rare Look at Design Genius Jony Ive - The Man Behind the Apple Watch
Jony Ive is the head of design at Apple and is responsible for the designs of iconic products like the iMac, iPad, and Apple Watch. He has a calming presence and is described as a very nice guy from London with a passion for design and making things himself. Ive has a close working relationship with the late Steve Jobs, who referred to Ive as his "spiritual partner," and the two worked closely together to revolutionize product design and make Apple the most successful technology company in the world. Ive leads a small design team at Apple's secretive design studio and is obsessively devoted to creating innovative, easy to use products through an emphasis on pure ideas over focus groups.
Jony Ive is the head of design at Apple and is responsible for the designs of iconic products like the iMac, iPad, and Apple Watch. He has a calming presence and is described as a very nice guy from London with a passion for design and making things himself. Ive has a close working relationship with the late Steve Jobs, who referred to Ive as his "spiritual partner," and the two worked closely together to revolutionize product design and make Apple the most successful technology company in the world. Ive leads a small design team at Apple's secretive design studio and is obsessively devoted to creating innovative, easy to use products through an emphasis on pure ideas over focus groups.
Man Behind the Apple Watch OCTOBER 1, 2014 8:00 AM by ROBERT SULLIVAN|photographed by DAVID SIMS
Photographed by David Sims, Vogue, October 2014 How Apples under-the-radar design genius, Jonathan Ive, has found the way to our hearts. I rst catch sight of Jony Ive across the Apple campus, in a plain Dodger-blue T-shirt and white painters pants, in conversation, nodding. The head Apple designer, who brought you the iMac and the iPad and now, the Apple Watch, has a nearly shaved head and a tightly trimmed beard. Hes not tall, not small, and looks as if he might be a formidable rugby opponentthough even from a distance he comes across as open and amenable, less likely to tackle you than to do what he is doing with a colleague at this very moment, which is listening. Ive has a calming presence, like the Apple campus itself, whose very address, Innite Loop, lulls you into a sense of Zen-ness. In the courtyard, trays of beautiful foodgrass- fed steaks and fresh-made curries and California-born hot sauceslead Apple employees out toward the open-air seating, away from the white cafeteria that might be described as a luxurious spa for the terminally nerdy. White is the color of choice at Apple HQ as in the Apple product line. It is through this white, with its clarity, its dust-hiding lack of distraction, that you have already met Jonathan Ive. To the south of the cafeteria is a tiny amphitheater, an emotional site in Apples history: At the companys 2011 memorial for Steve Jobs, Coldplay took the stage, as did Jony Ive. Ive is notoriously reluctant to give interviews, not to mention speak in public. But on that day he spoke for the man whom he called his dearest friend. For his part, Jobs, when he was alive, referred to Ive as his spiritual partner. I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, Ive told the assembled mourners, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts. Another thing Jobs understood way back in 1997, the year he returned to the company that had kicked him out a decade earlier, was that Ivethen still in his 20swas a designer with the background and the psychological tools not just to create the latest, hottest devices but also to orchestrate a team. Like cutting-edge steel, Ive is strong and persistent but exible, and most crucial (most Jobs-ian, in fact), he is passionate about things, as in things, literally. So much of my background is about making, physically doing it myself, he says. In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep their design talents backstage where they can do the most good. Theres an odd irony here, he observes. I think our goal is that you would have a sense that it wasnt design. RELATED STORIES
The Small Miracle of the Apple Watch The Apple Watch Has Landed: Will You Pick Up the Next Big Thing in Wearable Tech? When you sit down with Ive, he is eager to chattoo eager, maybe, for the Apple time-minders who are always looking around for himand will take a while to respond to a question, smiling as he says, This is going to be a kind of oblique answer. . . . We are talking in a white room, distracted only by a black non-Apple televisionitself a signpost to the question, When will Apple make TVs or whatever will replace them? Noticeably, his phone neither rings nor vibrates; he has designed the moment for concentration. He nurses a white mug of tea, and the only thing in the room besides an iPhone is the pair of reading glasses designed by his friend Marc Newson and tucked into the front of his T-shirt: simple, delicate, but clear and strong. I wish I could articulate this more effectively, he continues, addressing his ambitions as a designer. But it is to have that sense that you know there couldnt possibly be a sane or rational alternative. Ive is obsessed over in design blogs, the sites that cover Apple as if it were the Vatican, following leaks and rumors and passing along hijacked photos of components or screenspitching best guesses as to what Apple is working on next. One blog imagines what it would be like if Jony Ive designedwell, everything: Jony Ive redesigns . . . freeway signage . . . Coke . . . the solar system. You might spot the occasional photo of him out in the worldat the White House for a design award; in London being knighted, as he was two years ago, by Princess Anne; at a pizza dinner in San Francisco, sitting with Yahoos Marissa Mayer and various Silicon Valley execs. But one of the very natural settings for the real Jony Ive is a workshop at Apple HQ. It may be easier to sneak into a North Korean cabinet meeting than into the Apple design studio, the place where a small group of people have all the tools and materials and machinery necessary to develop things that are not yet things. Reportedly Ives wife, Heather Pegg, has never been he doesnt even tell her what hes working onand his twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not allowed in either. Work is conducted behind tinted windows, serenaded by the teams beloved techno music, a must for the boss. I nd that when I write I need things to be quiet, but when I design, I cant bear it if its quiet, he says. Indeed, the design team is said to have followed an unwritten rule to move away from their work whenever the famously brusque Jobs entered the studio and turn up the volume so as to make his criticisms less audible, less likely to throw them off course. In 1985, the year Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive was in design school in England, struggling with computers, blaming himself. Isnt that curious? he says now. Because if you tasted some food that you didnt think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, its part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us. Despite that initial obstacle, Ive seems to have been born to understand industrial design. He grew up in Chingford, on the outskirts of London near Epping Forest, a good place for a city kid who liked to play in the trees. His father, Michael Ive, is a silversmith, and his grandfather was an engineer. When Ive was a boy, his father worked with the British government to develop and set the standards for design education. When he made things with his sona toboggan, sayhe would demand that Jony sketch his design before commencing construction. As for the tree house Ive designed back then, guess what? Today he is critical. Id do it differently. His eyes light up as he says it, and you fully believe, in that moment, that he would happily drop everything to walk outside and work on it now. In high school, Ive studied sculpture and chemistry, and in 1985 he enrolled in the design program at Newcastle Polytechnic, where he became known as passionately detail-oriented, creating dozens of models of a hearing aid to be used by deaf children and their teachers. By the time he was out of school and working for a small design consultancy (called, coincidentally, Tangerine), a project he took on for Apple impressed the Cupertino company. They recruited him in 1992. Five years later, a disenchanted Ive was about to leave when Jobs returned to reboot the then-oundering Apple, which happened, by most analyses, when Jobs enabled Ive. By Ives account, the two hit it off immediately. It was literally the meeting showing him what wed worked on, Ive says, and we just clicked. Ive talks about feeling a little apart, like Jobs. When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonelybig laugh hereand I think that we both perceived the world in the same way. Design critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design, when manufacturers began to understand that consumers would pay more for craftsmanship. Together Jobs and Ive centered their work on the notion that computers did not have to look as if they belonged in a room at NASA. The candy-colored iMactheir rst smash hitfelt to consumers like a charming friend, revolutionary but approachable, and appealed to both men and women. I think what we sincerely try to do is create objects and products and ideas that are new and innovative, says Ive, but at the same time there is a slightly peculiar familiarity to them. The iMac was followed by laptops in cool brushed titanium, then white laptops. Apple was treating computers and media devices as tools, as more than just wires and RAM shoved in a box; they were not so much minimal devices as devices that coordinate functions. And then came the iPod and the iPhone, an invention like a divining rod, tapping into invisible streams of information. Throughout, Ive has rened Apples design process, which, he argues, is almost abstract in its devotion to pure idea: Good design creates the market; ideas are king. And heres the next irony that denes Ives career: In the clutter of contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on increasing currency. I think now more than ever its important to be clear, to be singular, he says, and to have a perspective, one you didnt generate as the result of doing a lot of focus groups. Developing concepts and creating prototypes leads to fascinating conversations with his team, says Ive. Its a process Ive been practicing for decades, but I still have the same wonder. For someone whose inuence on our lives is so huge, responsible not just for shifting whole economies but for changing the way we interact, Ive is extraordinarily low- prole. Hes a virtually unknown British character who became a central person in the explosion of the Internet, says his friend the Hong Kongborn businessman David Tang. Its amazing that hes not more widely talked about. On the Silicon Valley social circuit, hes an anomaly. The technology industry tends to feature people with big personalities who like to talk about their achievements, says Trevor Traina, a fth-generation San Franciscan entrepreneur who is a friend and neighbor of the Ives. Jony is humble and private, and he doesnt wear his achievements on his sleeve. Ive lives in the Pacic Heights neighborhood with his wife and sons. Heather is a writer, he says. Shes a creative too. We met at high school. I got married when I was 21, and Im 47. Married a long time. Isnt it cool? Their house, bought two years ago for $17 million, is by the storied architectural rm Polk & Co.Willis Polk oversaw the design of San Franciscos Palace of Fine Arts, which opened in 1915. Like his own father, Ive seems adamant about intention at home. My boys are ten, and I like spending time with them doing stuff that I did, which is drawing and making things real things, not virtual things, he says. Easygoing Ive morphs into Serious Ive on this point: He sees design schools failing their students by moving away from a foundation in traditional skills. I think its important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly, he says, to understand the properties youre working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself. Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own hands that keeps Ive grounded. Hes not distracted by any veneer of glamour, says Tang, who remarks on his friends thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two nely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved, Ive-designed ashtraysTang loves cigarsconstructed from the next-generation iPhone material. It was like getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tang says. Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously inventive ways to use the technology at his ngertips. When a presenter from Blue PeterBritains longest-running childrens TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft utilitarian designs from household objectscame to present him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peter badge depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In repayment, he red up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer- controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum like an origami ower, and in a mere ten hours created a Blue Peter badge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant cousin of the MacBook Air. His attention to detail is famous among his friends. Traina likes to joke with him that he couldnt imagine being Ives contractor, since nothing would escape his notice. One time I showed him a 1920s Cartier crystal, platinum, and diamond pocket watch that had been my fathers, Traina recalls. He took a quick look and later referred to the way the crystal was beveled, something I didnt even remember. Ives personal design tastes include the Castiglionis Snoopy lamp and another Castiglioni thats a parabolic glass that sits quite low. He likes his suits custom-made by British tailor Thomas Mahon, and might show up in one on the charity circuitat the Mid-Winter Gala, for instance, at a table with Marissa Mayer and Alexis and Trevor Traina; the Ives also cochaired the benet for Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty group in San Francisco. Ive commutes what used to be 45 minutes and can now be an hour and a half, no matter whether he is driving an Aston Martin or a Bentley or a Land Rover, a eet of cars that the British press watches like Apples stock price. He takes a vacation once in a while, often in London, setting up in a suite at Claridges while his family visits with the family of Marc Newson, the Australian designer who has remade everything from cars to furniture to restaurants to rst-class lounges for Qantas. When he and Newson relax, they do so by attempting to switch work offtough to do when you design the world though designers out for a drink will inevitably allow the poorly designed world to seep in. Shit we hate, says Newson, includes American cars. Its as if a giant stuck his straw in the exhaust pipe and inated them, he adds, when you look at the beautiful proportions in other cars that have been lost. The two also relax working, as they did recently on behalf of their mutual friend Bono, whose recent auction of Ive- and Newson-curated goods raised $13 million for (Red), Bonos charity to stop AIDS. The list included Ettore Sottsasss Olivetti typewriter; a Dieter Rams hi- (Rams himself showed up at New Yorks Sothebys that Saturday night last fall); an Airstream trailer; and a Leica that Newson and Ive lovingly tweaked together. We didnt even have to vocalize our pet hates, we were so in tune, Newson says. We only have to look at the object and look at each other and our eyes roll. Its a collaboration that is now a lock, apparently, since Apple recently announced that Newson would join Ives design team to work on special projects. Theyre a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth, jokes Bono. They nish each others sentences. They nish each others food, adds Bono. The kind of emotional and physical attraction people develop with Apple products shouldnt really be possible, but take a look around you. Friends marvel as Ive shifts from the guy cracking jokes to the solemn Sir Jonathan Ive. Jony is deadly serious, says Bono, who rst met Ive when Jobs dispatched him to an Irish pub to salvage a U2Apple iPod promotion. He is also serious fun to be around. When you go out for a pint with Jony, its kind of like going for a pint with the future, which is cool except you know hes not telling you what theyve really got planned. Feels nice, doesnt it? On my second visit to Cupertino, Ive has nally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is more watch than the computer geeks would ever have imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex wearers wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to meweeks before the products exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO Tim Cookin a situation room that has us surrounded by guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say, the weight of it, he nods. Because its real materials, he says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but solid snap, which he just loves as an interaction with design, a pure, tactile idea. Isnt that fantastic? At the beginning of our sitdown, he is slightly ustered at the attempt to condense all that went into the device into a single conversation. Its strange when youve been working on something for three years . . . he says, shaking his head. He describes the trajectory of clocks to watches: from a public clock in a Bavarian square to timepieces owned by royalty, to military chronometers, to the watchs arrival, only at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the wrist. Its fascinating how people struggled with wearing this incredibly powerful technology personally. The cell phone, of course, killed the watch to some extent. Now he wants to reset the balance. The Apple Watch is designed in three collections, with myriad variations, from elegantly luxurious to a brightly colored sporty version. On the back, LEDs emit light through sapphire-crystal windows, and photodiodes convert that light into a signal that algorithms use to calculate your heart rate. Got that? All of this syncs with your iPhone, making the watch the wrist-bound control tower of your life in tech. Monitor your heart rate or your movement in general. Tap to have Siri take a message, or send a voice reply. Pay for drinks with your wrist (Apple Pay will be, yes, Apple Watchcompatible). With this product, Apple is moving from your desk and your pocket onto your person, your pulse point. The watch underscores the fact that Ive is rst and foremost a masterly product designer; technology almost comes second. Its a beautiful object, a device you might like even if you dont like devices. Everything weve been trying to do, he says, its that pursuit of the very pure and very simple. Aside from all the ways the watch connects to your phone, Ive is very interested in how the watch can connect to another human. You know how very often technology tends to inhibit rather than enable more nuanced, subtle communication? he asks. This is the question that haunts the son of a craftsman: Is he making tools that improve the world or shut people down? We spent a lot of time working on this special mechanism inside, combined with the built-in speaker he demonstrates on his wrist. You can select a chosen person, also wearing the watch, and transmit your pulse to them. You feel this very gentle tap, he says, and you can feel my heartbeat. This is a very big deal, I think. Its being able to communicate in a very gentle way. Whether it is ultimately judged to be a big deal or another distraction remains to be seen. Either way, Ive eventually leaves the guarded room with his secrets intact for a few more weeks, passing through the bright white corridors decorated with long views of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a poster-like portrait of Steve Jobs holding up a Mac during one of his famous hard sellsthe trademark bold product introduction, the late CEOs big loud pitch. As you watch Ive walk off, politely thanking people, you recall that he closed up his private presentation by asking you to listen closely to a watchband as it is pulled off and then reconnected. You just press this button and it slides off, and that is just gorgeous, he was saying. He encouraged you to pause. But listen as it closes, he said. It makes this fantastic k-chit. He was nearly whispering. And when he said the word fantastic, he said it softly and slowlyfan-tas-tic!as if he never wanted it to end. This is perhaps Ives greatest achievement: not that we can get our email more readily, but that we can stop to notice a small, quiet connection.