Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Leander Kahney

He focuses on his team, his collaborators and, most of all, on Apple.

For Jony, it’s all about the work—but when talking about his work, he replaces I with we.

Design is his passion.

“We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don’t see that effort.

It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with.”

“As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.”

“I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.”

“When you are a designer, you have to be able to convey your ideas to people who are not designers; perhaps they are financing you or going to do the production, and you have to be able to turn them on to the product and its feasibility. Jony was able to do that.”

Students at Northumbria traditionally spend a lot of time learning how to make things.

They are taught how to sketch and draw; and how to operate drills, lathes and computer-controlled cutting machines.

Throughout this time, the emphasis is on creating and making.

“one with depth of discipline in a single area but also a breadth of empathy for other areas of design. So the British design school/art school vibe informs how Jony Ive interacts with service design, multimedia aspects, the packaging [and] the publicity.”

Jony internalized much from his Newcastle experience, including his habit of making and prototyping.

“Whatever he did was never quite enough; he was always looking to improve the design. He was exceptionally perceptive and diligent as a student. It was never a case of just going through the motions.”

“His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen a product like that before.”

When most students might build half a dozen models, Jony had built a hundred.

to thoroughly explore his ideas and get it right.

It was the first time he felt the humanity of a product.

Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.”

Jony was interested in getting things right and fit for purpose. He was completely interested in humanizing technology.

The model wasn’t just a mock-up of the phone’s shape, like most student projects. It also included all the internal components, and Jony had even worked out how it would be manufactured.

“I immediately fell in love with San Francisco and desperately hope that I can return there sometime in the future,”

He often would produce half a dozen great ideas in a very short space of time and was not only able to talk about them but could articulate them through some very good draftsmanship.”

“Rams’s design principles were implanted into us at design school—but we were not designing products that looked like Braun’s at Tangerine. Jony just liked the simplicity.”

He had the ability to remove, or ignore, how any product currently is, or how an engineer might say it must be.

“In an era of rapid change, Ive understood that style has a corrosive effect on design, making a product seem old before its time. By avoiding style, he found that his designs could not only achieve greater longevity, he could focus instead on the kind of authenticity in his work that all designers aspire to, but rarely achieve.”

I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, nor good at, building a business.”

“Jony told me that the reason he was so frustrated in consultancy was because he was not able to see projects through to completion,”

Apple offers a supportive environment. It’s the kind of place where a designer can focus less on day-to-day business and more on design as a craft.”

Brunner told Apple that he wanted to build a team within the company and turn Apple into a world-class design company.

Because they were big, they tended to be bureaucratic, another obstacle to good design.

Brunner wanted to re-create his small design agency, Lunar, within Apple. He wanted a “small, really tight” studio.

“We would run it like a small consulting studio, but inside the company,” he said. “Small, effective, nimble, h...

unconventional, idea driven, entrepreneurial.

“To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product. At the level that Jonathan was working, it becomes like a love affair. The process is exhilarating . . . and exhausting. But unless you’re willing to give everything to the work, the design will not be great.”

“We need new people at regular intervals to prevent ourselves from stagnating. But this can only happen if other people are willing to leave.”

“One, the job wasn’t fun, and to be brutally honest I was losing interest in it. I was spending more and more time in management meetings where I would be there for eight hours and only really needed to be there for thirty minutes. You feel like you are atrophying, you are wasting away. I’m not the kind of person that can just do the job even though you fucking hate it. Can’t do it.”

Jony had what it took to succeed in a corporate environment. He was willing to sit through the endless meetings and battle middle managers to get his designs made.

Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is ‘Here’s how people like to do things.’”35

The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

“It’s the products. The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore.”

Design is how it works.”

“Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.”

“The iMac revolved not around chip speed or market share but squishy questions like ‘How do we want people to feel about it?’ and ‘What part of our minds should it occupy?’”

The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

‘Here are the guts’—processor, hard drive—and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box. When you do it that way, you come up with awful products.”

“Less parts means better tolerancing and better part-to-part relationships,” said one designer. In other words, the product goes together better.

Why give the consumer a big ugly tower just because it’s the easiest option for the engineers and designers?

He had to figure out the battery, screen, chips and other components, plus what kind of team would be required to get it made. When he was done, a feasibility study would be reported to Jobs.