Jonathan iVE: The Designs of Jonathan Ive

j o n at h a n

by Justin Lumiere

From designing toilets and drills, to creating the designs which have revolutionized the computing, communication, and music industries, Ive is one of the worlds most wellknown designers, and those who don’t know him, at least know the products he designs.

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a suburb of London, on February 27th, 1967. Ive was diagnosed with dyslexia (something Ive shared with future pal Steve Jobs) early on. He loved to disassemble and re-assemble radios & other electronics in order to discover how they work. This eventually turned into an interest in how things were made, their form, and the materials. His father, Mike Ive, was a silversmith and teacher in Essex. His skill at making things led to his initial decision to teach handicraft as a career, but a later rise in the educational hierarchy afforded him wider influence. Mike was among the distinguished teachers plucked from daily teaching by the Education Ministry and given the grand title of Her Majesty’s Inspector.

He assumed responsibility gland ,

for monitoring the quality of teaching at schools in his district, focusing specifically on design and technology (foreshadowing Ive’s later take-over as senior vp of design at Apple). In the forward looking design & technology curriculum Mike helped devise, the emphasis shifted from shop skills courses to one which integrated and mixed academics with making things. Mike helped write the

mandatory curriculum that became the blueprint for all uk schools, as England and Wales were the first countries in the world to make design technology education available for all children between the ages of five and sixteen.

Friends remember Mike Ive talking about Jony’s progress in school and his growing passion for design. But Mike wasn’t a pushy dad, trying to turn his son into a prodigy like the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

Mike’s influence on his son’s talent was purely nurturing.

He was constantly talking to Jonathan about design.

Prepare for challenges on many axes.

Focus on good design, not profits.

Ive’s Design Philosophy Be familiar and fluent with technology.

Invest an incredible amount of care.

Have respect for craftsmanship.

Could it have been done better?

“Different and new is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.”

-Jony Ive

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A pparently I ve has a thing for working for companies named after food. Ive joined a London design startup called Tangerine where he designed a diverse array of products, such as microwave ovens and toothbrushes. However, his frustration with the position reached a turning point after he designed a toilet, bidet and sink for client Ideal Standard, and the company’s boss rejected Ive’s work, stating that

the products were too costly and looked too modern. Ive was unhappy working for clients he disliked and didn’t possess the same principles on simplicity and beauty conjoined with design. Apple was a client of Tangerine which Ive appreciated and he had been acting in a consultancy role for the computer firm while creating the initial Powerbook designs in California. Apple had been attempting to recruit him as a full-time employee for two years without success and eventually became a fulltime Apple employee in 1992.

Shortly before Jobs’s return to Apple, Ive nearly resigned from the company. Ive’s boss at the time, managed to retain Ive as an employee by explaining that Apple was “going to make history” following the revival of the company. When Steve Jobs was first returning to Apple, he was astounded

by He became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in 1997 and subsequently headed the industrial design team responsible for most of the company’s significant hardware products. Ive’s first design assignment was the iMac; it helped pave the way for many other designs such as the iPod and eventually the iPhone and the iPad. Jobs made design a chief focus of

The new new. Ive’s designs for the iMac, which helped revive Apple, had no straight lines or hard corners, only curved lines and soft edges. It’s colorful and rounded appearance made it more friendly to consumers.

the firm’s product strategy, and Ive proceeded to establish the firm’s leading position with a series of functionally clean, aesthetically pleasing, and remarkably popular products. Ive explained the close rapport that existed in his working relationship with Jobs in 2014: “When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same. And we

would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things.”

U sing new materials is a part of Ive’s modus operandi.

He created the iMac with the use of colorful, trasnslucent, polycarbonate (a nod to his design of the eMate for apple in 1997). Apple’s focus on design has allowed each of its subsequent products to create a distinctive identity. Ive avoid

using the beige colors as well as boxy shapes and straight lines which pervaded the PC industry of the time. This design idea was copied by many other companies not just within the computing world. No more straight lines.

No more beige boxes. Ive created a computer which looked friendly and inviting to consumers. He created a truely personal computer.

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T he work and principles of Dieter Rams, the chief designer at Braun from 1961 until 1995, influenced Ive’s work. This is best noted with the design of the first generation iPod, which closely resembles Ram’s design for the Braun T3 pocket radio.

The similarities can be understood in that there is the same idea behind both designers: to make the design simply be what the product is and how it functions. The first iPod was released on October 23, 2001, and allowed consumers to carry up to an astonishing 1,000 songs with them wherever they would go. This simplicity of functional design appealed to consumers and lead to revolutionize the entire music industry. Combined with Apple’s iTunes, consumers could cary all of the music they wanted with minimal bulk.

Ive’s work bears a striking resemblence to that of Deiter Rams’ work Braun as seen here with Braun’s T3 Pocket Radio.

I ve challenged what the world thought a computer should be with the introduction of the first generation of the iPhone on June 29, 2007.

At the time, smart phones had tiny versions of everything; tiny applications, tiny operating systems, tiny buttons - but the iPhone challenged and changed all of that. Starting the idea from Job’s request to come up with a product to battle the rising tablet market, Ive’s industrial design team developed a capacitive touchscreen designed for a bare finger, or multiple fingers for multi-touch sensing. Then, they brought the idea to the iPod of the time by melting off the face of one and replacing it with the new multi-touch screen design, a bigger idea was born. Together with Jobs, Ive’s team developed yet another device which changed multiple industries at the

same time.

A device with more power and connectivity than the first iMac was now able to fit into the palm of your hand. The iPhone has a minimal hardware user interface, featuring five buttons.

With only one physical menu button is situated directly below the display, the “Home button” closes the active app and navigates to the home screen of the interface. The home button is denoted not by a house, as on many other similar devices, but a rounded square, reminiscent of the shape of icons on the home screen. The iPhone’s design was soon copied by major cellphone manufacture.

The first generation iPhone, designed by Ive and his team at Apple, challenged what the world thought a personal computer could be, while still holding true to his simplistic beauty in design.

“There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.”

-Jony Ive

W ith his simplistic concepts , Ive has designed almost everything. Some of his earliest designs were for a design firm in London named Tangerine. There he designed everything from pens to toilets. His beautifully thoughtful and functional designs eventually landed him a job working in Apple’s Industrial Design department where his talents were noticed by Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple as their Interim CEO. Beginning with the iMac, Ive has created some of the most well-known designs in the world, changing industry after industry. He was even a part of the design team for Pixar’s (back when Steve Jobs owned it) film, Wall-E, by lending his design style to the character, Eve. As of early 2014, Ive is listed as an inventor on over 730 U.S. design and utility patents, as well as many more related patents around the world. On October 29th 2012, with the announcement of Apple’s iOS7 and Ive’s role as principal, it was announced that his new title at Apple would be: Senior Vice President of Design.

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I ve ’ s design asthetic , stating that both function and form are one, creates beauty from simplicity. The computer has ceased to be a device used only on a desk; it’s now a part of our lives all of the time. The iPad started out as a bridge between the smart phone and the personal computer but now more and more technology is heading in that direction.

What is an iPad but a simpler laptop without an attached keyboard? The brilliance of Ive and his team has developed a handheld devise larger than the iPhone yet smaller than laptop, or desktop, which can travel anywhere with minimal design. In Gary Hustwit’s documentary film Objectified (2009), Rams says that Apple is one of only a handful of companies existing today that design products according to Rams’ ten principles of “good design.”

Design is a nonnegotiable for Ive. It is at the very core of doing business. Other companies around the world have begun to copy this idea of Ive’s as well, now thinking of design the way they used to think about cost or profit-margin. this has gone so far as to now include the insides of devices. Beginning with the G5 Mac Pro Tower, Ive has been responsible for the internal Left: When Ive designed the iPad, he puilled from the same idea behind the iPhone - simplicity is key.

Below: When Pixar needed a design for a cool, future-tech robot to contrast against the dirty, clunky nature of the title character in Wall-E, they turned to Ive due to his success in designing some of the world’s most beautiful technology. It also helped that Ive’s closest friend (Steve Jobs) also owned Pixar.

look of Apples products as well. More recently, Ive went from being responsible for just Apple’s physical products but also to the way their software looks and feels. He is a huge proponent of what is called “flat design.” This was first seen in Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7 where objects do not look the same as their real-world counterparts but are simpler and intuitive; things look the way they function rather than mimicking the real-world. Ive has made the electronic world we live in more simple - taking away the things we don’t need and leaving only the most basic and necessary objects to interact with.

Because of this mentality in design, there are now more designers out there asking themselves, “What would Ive do?” when approaching an idea or concept.

When Ive first designed the headphones, which come complimentary with every iPod and iPhone, he was haunted by the design asking himself, “Could it have be better?“ In 2012 he showed his care, craftsmanship, and focus on design (rather than profits) by completly redesigning these free headphones to both function better and to be more beautiful.

Sources: Kahney, Keander, Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products,(New York, Penguin Group, 2013).

Apple Inc., accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.apple.com/ Time Magazine, “Jonathan Ive Designs Tomorrow,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://time.com/jonathan-ive-apple-interview/ Museum of Modern Art, “Jonathan Ive (British, born 1967),” accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.moma.org/collection/artist. php?artist_id=25843 Business Insider, “Check Out The Earliest Work Of Apple’s Design Leader Jony Ive,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://www. businessinsider.com/check-out-the-earliest-work-of-apples-design-leader-jony-ive-2013-11?op=1 CNN, “Apple’s Ive helped design the heroine of Pixar’s Wall-E,” accessed April 1, 2014, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/05/12/ fortune-apples-ive-helped-design-the-heroine-of-pixars-wall-e/ Wikipedia, “Jonathan Ive,” accessed April 1, 2014, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive

Designed and written by Justin Lumiere Composed in: Myriad Pro Semibold, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly in 1992, Avenir Black & Medium, typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, Century Scoolbook Regular, typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1918.

Printed from a Canon Image Runner onto 40# text Copyright © 2014 Justin Lumiere, Portland, Maine, Maine College of Art