He has created some of the most recognisable and iconic objects of our age, but Apple’s head designer Jony Ive has always been something of an enigma. The Briton behind the iMac and the iPod is usually as secretive about himself as Apple is about its products, but recently he and and the tech giant gave unprecedented access for a New Yorker piece.
The profile, by Ian Parker, runs to 20 pages in print and takes about an hour to read. Perhaps in the spirit of Ive, we’ve rounded the corners and – here are the key things we learned:
1. Ive has a lot of famous friends
Coldplay’s Chris Martin, U2’s Bono, Massive Attack, Yo-Yo Ma, designers Paul Smith and Marc Newson (who now works for Apple too), director JJ Abrams and Stephen Fry all crop up as friends of Ive.
2. He’s had a hand in the design of the new Star Wars lightsabers thanks to a boozy dinner with JJ Abrams
Ive said Abrams told him his thoughts were partly responsible for the new style of lightsaber in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, although he doesn’t explicitly mention the cross-shaped guards. Ive told Parker: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty ... more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”
3. Ive’s not unfamiliar with getting involved in making films
Jobs gave Ive special dispensation to remove himself from public speaking, instead swapping them for appearances in scripted videos. And despite Apple having one of the most polished images and highly tuned corporate public relations, Ive’s presentation video for the launch of the Apple Watch was largely directed and edited by him.
4. Earlier in his career, things were less glamorous: Ive designed a bath, a sink and a toilet
Before Ive started at Apple in 1992 he worked for design consultancy Tangerine in London. There Ive designed the Macintosh Folio tablet concept for Apple, which had a stylus and an adjustable angled screen, as well as a sink, toilet and bath for British bathroom firm Ideal Standard. “It was a very, very simple bowl, and the rim was thick but it twisted,” he said. “It was sort of tipped open at the front.”
5. Now Ive has a 12-foot square glass-walled office
That office has a Playmobil likeness of Ive, a Banksy print of the Queen with the face of a chimpanzee, and a poster saying “believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night ... think about all the fucking possibilities.” His office is in Apple’s design studio, protected by a 10ft-long internal vestibule that obscures all the prototypes and work from all but the permitted to enter.
6. Jobs’s office and Ive’s lab were linked by a special corridor (and Ive didn’t realise this was unusual)
Parker writes that: “A covered corridor connects One Infinite Loop (Jobs’s office) and Two Infinite Loop (Ive’s lab). Just before Ive took me into the studio for the first time, he remarked that all the buildings were similarly linked. A colleague corrected him: this was true only of One and Two. Ive said: ‘Really?’”
7. Apple has three specialist recruiters who hire designers, and they only hire one a year
The company has a core of 19 international industrial designers who work 12-hour days starting about 6am and can’t discuss any of their work with the outside world. Only about one a year joins and in the last 15 years, only two have left, one through ill health. Apple employs three recruiters with the sole purpose to find people to join the design team.
8. When Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, Ive had his resignation letter in his pocket
Ive said he assumed his job was on the line and a new design head would be brought in, but they instantly hit it off: “It was the most bizarre thing, where we were both perhaps a little – a little bit odd. We weren’t used to clicking.” Jobs visited the design studio and told them: “You’ve not been very effective, have you?” But by the end of that day they started collaborating on the iMac, which Jobs insisted should be “lickable”.
9. It was Jobs that brought in Apple’s skeuomorphism, and Ive never liked it
Jobs liked digital facsimiles of analog designs, with the fake leather stitching of iCal and other apps based on the interior of Jobs’ private jet. Ive disliked the approach, although thought it was important for the first iPhone for familiarity, but didn’t intervene because he was at the stage of “I don’t think this is right, but I’m really busy doing my stuff”.
10. Ive is (unsurprisingly) obsessive about the little things
It wasn’t until Ive was given free rein over iOS 7 after Jobs’ death that he could finally change the design and smooth out the corners of the iPhone app icons. He says: “They drove me crazy. All I could see were these unresolved tangency breaks”.
11. Especially about corners, rounded corners
Powell Jobs (Steve’s wife) says Ive and Jobs would discuss corners “for hours and hours”.
12. His obsession with detail means Apple campus is going to have awesome lift controls
Ive says he had “a big fight” over simplifying the control panels for the buildings’ Mitsubishi lifts. No need to ask who won.
13. Lift controls are Ive’s domain because he’s also co-designing Apple’s new campus ( …and his own new house)
Both Apple’s new “spaceship” campus and his house involve Ive working with Foster + Partners. Lord Foster’s firm has 30 architects working on the campus, and the house in Pacific Heights, California sounds like it’ll be pretty impressive too – construction involves driving piles 12 metres (40ft) into the ground. It’s “a curious thing that we tend to compartmentalise, based on physical scale” says Ive – who sees his industrial design skills translating into architecture.
14. Not even Ive could stop the protruding camera lens on the iPhone 6
When asked about the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus camera lens sticking out of the back of the phones, which allows them to be thinner overall but not sit flat on a table, Ive simply said it was “a really very pragmatic optimisation. And, yeah …”.
15. Apple employees tried to live with every 0.1in screen-sized prototypes of iPhones
It took Ive three years to settle on the screen sizes for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with prototypes made from 4in to over 6in before the end of 2011. Colleagues carried around the prototypes for days. Ive says: “The first one we really felt good about was a 5.7 … and then, sleeping on it, and coming back to it, it was just ‘Ah, that’s way too big.’” Or as Tim Cook puts it: “Jony didn’t pull out of his butt the 4.7 and the 5.5.”
16. Ive pressed for the iPad before the iPhone
Ive was the driving force for the iPad, which he thought Apple should make before the iPhone. Jobs overruled him, saying the iPhone would introduce people to the concept of touchscreen control in a more familiar form – he said the iPad first would have had people deal with both a new category of computer and a new way of interacting with it.
17. Despite his line of work, he has strict screen time rules for his kids
Ive’s twin 10-year-old boys are prevented from accessing the iPad, among other screens, for as long as they would like. Also they still pronounce “aluminium” the British way despite growing up in San Francisco, as does Ive, whose accent is apparently unchanged.
18. Ive has got a penchant for cars (so maybe those Apple Car rumours aren’t so far fetched after all)
He is in fact a bit of a car nut, attending the Goodwood Festival of Speed every year. He owns an Aston Martin DB4 and owned his first Bentley 10 years ago. He commutes an hour to work every day in another Bentley – which is chauffeur-driven. (He says the reasons for liking Bentleys are “entirely design-based” and he “resisted and resisted” due to the other connotations.) Apple’s head of operations Jeff Williams, says Ive describes his Toyota Camry simply as “Oh God”.
19. That slight tendency for bling says something about the design of the Apple Watch
The first model of the Apple Watch took six weeks to design, but it took Ive a year to settle on the interchangeable watch straps. In Ive’s view, people are “OK to a degree” with carrying an identical smartphone to millions of other people, but a watch needs to be more unique”.
20. There’s a very good design reason as to why the Apple Watch’s ‘digital crown’ isn’t where you would expect it
The “digital crown” is positioned off to one side and closer to the screen than the back, rather than being symmetrical like a winding wheel on a traditional watch. Ive says this is because its function is different … to place it centrally would be “literally referencing what’s happened in the past” but “the information about what it does is then wrong.” So that explains that then.
21. And of course the face isn’t round for a good reason too
It’s square because “when a huge part of the function is lists a circle doesn’t make any sense”.
22. Talking of faces (and cover your ears, Google), the face is ‘the wrong place’ for technology
Apple was working on a watch before Google revealed its smartglasses, but even so it was clear to Ive that the face “was the wrong place” and that the wrist was “the obvious and right place” for a notification device. As Cook adds, the device on the wrist “isn’t obnoxious” and doesn’t act as a barrier between people (although Parker notes Cook still gets notifications from a young woman silently appearing in his line of sight with a bit of paper – maybe that’ll change once he has an Apple Watch!)
23. And finally, at school Ive was nicknamed ‘Tiny’
When he was 13, as Ive puts it: “I was as big as I am now.”
