JONATHAN PAUL IVE: The creator behind Apple

orn February, 1967 is an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPod and iPhone. Jonathan Ive was born in Chingford, London. He was raised by his teacher father and attended Chingford Foundation School; and then Ive went on to attend Walton High School in Staffordshire. He then studied Industrial Design at Northumbria University (Newcastle Polytechnic at the time). After a short time at the London design agency Tangerine, he moved to the United States in 1992 to pursue his career at Apple Inc. He gained his current job title upon the return of Steve Jobs in 1997, and since then has headed the Industrial Design team responsible for most of the company’s significant hardware products. There have been four distinct phases in Apple’s product design during Steve Jobs’ and Jonathan Ive’s collaboration: This first phase appeared in 1997 with the eMate, followed in 1998 with the release of the original Bondi-blue iMac(see below). This motif was later applied to the first iBook models released in 1999, and the Blue and White Power Mac G3 and their accompanying Studio Displays. The design was characterized by translucent surfaces with either a candy-like or milky-white coloring and soft, bulging contours. Subdued vertical pinstripes were made to show through the translucent faces of these products. Printed on the back panel for ports and agency approval marks was a lenticular plaque that contains a wavy 3D pattern. AC power cords were also translucent, with the twisted wires visible within them. The translucency and colors in this style appear to have been inspired by gumdrop candies, and Ive reportedly visited confectionery plants to learn to replicate the gumdrop’s visual effect. Ive and his team went on to develop novel manufacturing techniques in order to build products based on this design motif. Only the PowerBook G3 was uninfluenced by the translucent style (with the exception of a translucent, bronze-colored keyboard on the Lombard and Pismo models, and retained its opaque black casing until it was replaced by the Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001.The candy color on the first iMac model is called “Bondi blue”, a reference to the color of the water at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Ive’s team designed the original iMac.The “Bondi blue” iMac was replaced with five fruit colors in January 1999, “Blueberry” (a bright blue); “Grape” (purple); “Tangerine” (orange); “Lime” (green); and “Strawberry” (pinkish red). Two of these, “Tangerine” and “Blueberry”, became the first colors for the iBook. Blueberry was also the color for the Blue and White Power Mac G3 and its displays. These candy colors heralded a trend in consumer goods where everything from clock radios to hamburger grillers sported bright plastic translucent enclosures. In late 1999, the iMac’s fruit colors were joined by a quieter color scheme called “Graphite”, in which the colored elements were replaced with a smoky grey and some of the white elements were made transparent. Graphite was the color of the iMac Special Edition models, and the first Power Mac G4. Next came “Ruby” (dark red), “Sage” (forest green), “Indigo” (deep blue) and “Snow” (milky white) in 2000. The iBooks’ colors were also updated: Blueberry was replaced with Indigo, Tangerine was replaced with Key Lime (an eye-popping neon green), and Graphite was added at the high end. In 2001, two new color schemes were introduced: “Flower Power” and “Blue Dalmatian.” “Flower Power” was white with flowers, and “Blue Dalmatian” was a blue similar to the original “Bondi blue”, but with white spots. The “Snow” color scheme was also used on the second generation iBook. In 2001, Apple designs shifted away from multicolored translucency and began two new design branches. The professional motif appeared with the Powerbook G4, and featured industrial grade metal: first titanium, then aluminum. The minimalist consumer design debuted with the iBook G3, and featured glossy white coloring and opaque finishes. Both lines did away with soft, bulging shapes and moved toward streamlined, orthogonal, minimalist shapes. The designs appear to have been heavily influenced by German industrial designer Dieter Rams, with a clear example being the iPhone calculator application, which appears to have been directly influenced by Dieter Rams’ 1978 Braun Control ET44 calculator. The iPod continued the look of the consumer line, featuring an opaque, white front. The success and wide embrace of Apple’s iPod appeared to have had an effect on Ive and his design team, and some noted the striking similarity of the iPod’s design with the subsequent iMac G5 and Mac mini designs. Apple even promoted the release of the iMac G5 as coming “from the creators of iPod,” and, in the accompanying promotional photographs, both products were shown next to each other in profile, highlighting the similarities in their design. The more recent Airport Extreme, Apple TV, and iPhone designs have continued this trend toward a simple rounded-rectangle styling across product lines. The more recent designs move away from white plastics, replacing them with glass and aluminum. This new design phase showed Apple’s strive towards extreme minimalism: aluminum “unibody” products possess cleaner, yet softer and more tapered edges than those of their predecessors, and remove anything that “does not need to be there,” creating an extremely clean surface. The first generation iPhone debuted this new style, showing off darker aluminium on its back and a glass front. The design was then carried over to the iMac line, which now consists mostly of aluminum face, except for a black rim around the screen, and a glass covered screen. The iPod Classic brought this motif to the iPod line, and featured a dark, aluminum face. The Macbook Air blends the aluminum styling of the Macbook Pro line with the new style pattern through its keyboard and glossy display. On October 14th, 2008 Apple released a redesigned MacBook Pro in line with this style direction. Like the MacBook Air before them, the chassis of the new MacBook Pro is milled from a single piece of aluminum, this ‘unibody’ construction is aimed to reduce chassis size and the number of chassis parts required, along with increasing chassis rigidity. A fifth generation iPod, one of Apple’s most recognized industrial designs. Critics regard Ive’s work as being among the best in industrial design, and his team’s products have repeatedly won awards such as the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Industrial Design Excellence Award. Ive was the winner of the Design Museum’s inaugural Designer of the Year award in 2002, and won again in 2003. In 2004, he was a juror for the award. The Sunday Times named Ive as one of Britain’s most influential expatriates on 27 November 2005: “Ive may not be the richest or the most senior figure on the list, but he has certainly been one of the most influential… The man who designed the iPod and many more of Apple’s most iconic products has shaken up both the music and the electronics industry.” Ive was number three on a list of 25. Ive was also listed in the 2006 New Years Honours list, receiving a CBE, for services to the design industry. The British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, was revealed as being an iPod owner in June 2005. A recent Macworld poll listed Ive joining Apple in 1992 as the sixth most significant event in Apple history, while MacUser (a subsidiary of Macworld) writer Dan Moren suggested recently that, when the time comes for Steve Jobs to step down as CEO of Apple, Ive would be an excellent candidate for the position, justifying the statement by saying that he “embodies what Apple is perhaps most famous for: design.” On July 18, 2007, Ive received the 2007 National Design Award in the product design category for his work on the iPhone. The Daily Telegraph rated him the most influential Briton in America on 11 January 2008. In July 2008, Ive was awarded the MDA Personal Achievement award for the design of the iPhone. In May 2009, Ive received an Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design. Ive is married to a historian named Heather and is the father of twins. The family lives in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco, California. He is an alumnus of North Umbria University having studied the Design for Industry programme and was awarded an Honorary degree from the University in 2000.

orking in the background behind Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is Jonathan Ive, the man whose design signature is writ large on the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Like all great artists, Jonathan Ive’s signature can be found on his work. Sort of. It’s almost invisible, undetectable. But it’s there, etched at the base of the reverse side of every one of Apple Inc.’s iPods, iPhones and iPads: “Designed by Apple in California.” It’s a simple statement to place on a technology product – alongside the obligatory “Assembled in China” – but it speaks volumes about the emphasis Apple places on the work of Mr. Ive, the company’s shy, unassuming and relatively unknown senior vice-president of industrial design. While the Apple spotlight is focused on the computer titan’s bombastic chief executive, Steve Jobs, among the hordes of Mac faithful, Mr. Ive is often hailed as the design genius who helped fuel Apple’s turnaround from also-ran computer maker to the king of high-end electronics. The 43-year-old Briton is responsible for leading the design team that created many of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s signature, culture-shifting products, including the colourful iMac, the iPod music player, the iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer. Canadians will soon see his latest work for themselves. Orders for the iPads begin on Monday, with product shipments arriving on May 28. In the industrial-design community, Mr. Ive is heralded as something of a guru, the man who changed computers from dull beige boxes into candy-coloured, user-friendly, designer electronics. His work has become the focus of design-school case studies, while his creations, including the original iPod, have joined the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “In industrial design, Apple is used as a case study to the extent that it’s become something of a cliché to use them, or to use Jonathan Ive,” said Jules Goss, chairman of the industrial design department at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.”But at the same time, that’s still an incredibly robust case study about the value of excellent form and interaction design combined with a very appropriately designed set of capabilities.” Still, while Mr. Jobs has evolved into a household name, one that is synonymous with Apple and its products, Mr. Ive eschews the spotlight.

He rarely appears at Apple product-launch events and rarely grants interviews. (Apple declined an interview request for this story). Although Mr. Jobs receives the lion’s share of the credit for Apple’s rise from the doldrums to a company with a US$215-billion market capitalization today, Mr. Ive is seen by many analysts as the man who helped turn many of the Apple founder’s ideas into products. There are even whispers that Mr. Ive is on the short list to replace Mr. Jobs as chief executive when the Apple founder eventually steps down.”It’s one of those partnerships where I think what Steve Jobs was providing was this idea of a very user-oriented, real life, people-friendly computer,” Mr. Goss said. “Instead of approaching it from an engineering, techy perspective … he looked at it from a kind of design perspective: how can we make people use this technology? What Jonathan Ive did was absolutely beautifully packaged that in a way that was, as you know, aspirational, with great attention to detail and beautiful materials.” Mr. Jobs is famous for being a details-oriented perfectionist who must approve every detail of Apple events – right down to the make and model of chairs used at particular booths. He once reportedly had a shipment of Italian marble sent to Cupertino so that he could inspect the veining in the stone before it could be installed in Apple’s first Manhattan retail outlet. That approach to detail is something the two men share. In an interview with the British newspaper The Independent in 2008, Mr. Ive described design as “everything and nothing. We think of design as not just the product’s appearance, it’s what the product is, how it works. The design and the product itself are inseparable.” Of course, there are other similarities between the like-minded chief executive and chief designer, who reportedly speak every day. Both relish their privacy, largely avoiding industry events and flashy indulgences. While Mr. Jobs’ black turtlenecks, blue jeans and sneakers, which he sports at virtually all Apple events, have become something of a uniform for the CEO, Mr. Ive is rarely photographed in anything but a dark t-shirt, his handsome face with a healthy dash of five o’clock shadow. They do differ in one way. While Mr. Jobs has been criticized by former employees for being a tyrant, Mr. Ive is widely described as being a nice guy. It was in 1985 that Mr. Ive first fell in love with Apple. It was during his time as a student at the Newcastle Polytechnic in the United Kingdom, where he won the student’s award for design from the Royal Society of Arts, twice, that Mr. Ive first used a Mac computer, an experience he has recalled in vivid detail in several interviews. “I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use,” Mr. Ive said in a 2007 interview with the British Council’s Design Museum. “I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers.

I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its value and its structure. The more I learned about this cheeky almost rebellious company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry.” Upon graduation, Mr. Ive spent several years developing everything from power tools to bathroom sinks for a London design consultancy startup called Tangerine Design. Eventually, he ended up advising Apple on the PowerBook PC line before being offered a job at Apple in 1992, under then-chief executive Gilbert Amelio. “When I joined Apple, the company was in decline,” Mr. Ive told the Design Museum. “It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that never shared its goals.” Mr. Ive persevered and was credited with designing the first handheld device to run Apple’s Newton software, eventually rising to the post of design chief in 1996 at the age of 29. When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in July 1997, he slashed the number of products the company was selling from more than 60 to just four. But he also began a global search for a new design chief, one who could help him realize his plans for the future of the company. According to a 2006 profile of Mr. Ive in BusinessWeek magazine, Mr. Jobs attempted to woo Richard Sapper, who designed IBM’s Thinkpad laptop, car designer Giorgetto Guirgiaro and architect Ettore Sotsass, before realizing he already had the designer he needed.”By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from other companies,” Mr. Ive told the Design Museum. “Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction. Apple’s fanatical devotion to security is legendary and the open-concept studio Mr. Ive shares with his team at Apple headquarters is no exception – it’s strictly off limits to all but the company’s most senior executives. In the past, Mr. Ive has said many of the company’s greatest inventions were cooked up while the team sat munching on pizza in the studio’s kitchen as a powerful sound system fills the open working space with music. Today, the products emanating from the open concept studio Mr. Ive shares with the dozen or so members of his staff (their starting salary was north of $200,000 in 2006, 50% above the industry average according to BusinessWeek) are among the most coveted in the world. Apple has sold more than 100 million iPods, redefining the portable music-player market, if not the music business itself. The company’s Macbook computers are now ubiquitous on college campuses, while the iPhone is becoming the gold standard for consumer smartphones. Demand for Mr. Ive’s latest masterpiece, the iPad, was so fierce in the United States – Apple sold more than a million in the first 28 days of sales – that the company was forced to delay the international launch of the device by more than a month. As for Mr. Ive, he usually declines to talk about the impact Apple’s creations have had on popular culture, insisting that seeing someone using a Macbook on a plane or listening to an iPod using the device’s iconic white headphones is enough. “I’m not driven by making a cultural impact,” he told The Independent. “That’s just a consequence of taking a remarkably powerful technology and making it relevant. My goal is simply to try to make products that really are meaningful to people. Ultimately, there is something motivating and inspiring in seeing someone using an Apple product and enjoying an Apple product.”