The British Design Genius Behind Apple's Success - Wall Street Journal (blog)
By Ben Rooney
With the resignation of Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple, many are worried about the vacuum he leaves. But behind Mr. Jobs' success was a designer with the flare and the same exacting attention to detail, who was responsible for turning Mr. Jobs' ideas into global category-defining products.
Jonathan ('Jony') Ive may not be a name that many are familiar with, but scan any commuter carriage or bus pretty well anywhere in the world, and you will see his work. In the world of design he is as close to a god as any human can get.
Mr. Ive, 44, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, is the Essex Man made good behind all of Apple's iconic products, the iMac, the iPod and the iPad.
He was born in Essex, a county in England more famous for body waxing and fake tans than producing global corporate giants, and attended a polytechnic in Newcastle, the other end of the country.
From the moment Mr. Jobs reassumed command of the then flailing Apple, brought low by a series of uninspiring CEOs who failed to understand what made Apple, well, Apple, Mr. Ive has been a key part of the team that transformed the Cupertino company into one of the world's biggest companies.
It was Mr. Ive who was behind all of Apple's iconic products. In a time when computers were boxes made from beige plastic, Mr. Ive's tear-shaped colored iMacs became instant design classics.
But it was the iPod, and then the iPad, that really catapulted Apple into the business stratosphere. It was Mr. Ive who designed both.
Mr Ive is famous for not being famous. He is known for driving around the Valley in a British-made Bentley, but apart from that he keeps a very low profile, seldom, if ever, granting interviews and does not attend Apple's highly stage-managed product launches.
Those who have met him describe him as "the nicest man in technology".
What is known about the elusive Mr. Ive is what he shares with his former boss, a near obsessional devotion to detail coupled with a refusal to accept compromise.
Fellow British designer Steven Bayley gave a glowing profile of Mr. Ive in a recent profile for Britain's Daily Mail.
Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist's atelier.
With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the 'design' begins. It's a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It's what Ive calls 'effort and care beyond the usual'. He has very few distractions.
And it is because Ive fully understands the arcana of bonding, coating and abstruse areas of plastic technology that an iPod Nano looks and feels the way it does. It is the very opposite of slick, superficial design: it is the inevitable result of his working methods. Ive detests shape-making for its own sake and uses 'arbitrary' as a term of abuse.
His work has been rewarded with financial success by Apple and recognition by his peers; he was also made a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005. His work, including the original iPod, have joined the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Although Mr. Ive is reported to have bought a mansion in Somerset in England, there is no suggestion that he is planning to leave Apple. While the loss of Steve Jobs to Apple is a blow, were Mr. Ives to depart as well, Apple's future would suddenly look precarious.
25 Aug, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGF20tkf4ytmLqLxpN0naB9_VSTvA&url=http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/08/25/the-british-design-genius-behind-apples-success/
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