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Jony Ive

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Jonathan Ive
Jonathan Ive (right) with John Lasseter at the end of Macworld Expo 2008 keynote
BornFebruary, 1967 (1967-02-09) (age 42)
Chingford, England, United Kingdom
Occupation(s)Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple Inc.

Jonathan Paul Ive, CBE (born 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, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Early life

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).

Career

After a short time at the London design agency Tangerine[2], he moved to the United States in 1992 to pursue his career at Apple Inc.[3] 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.

Design motifs

There have been four distinct phases in Apple's product design during Steve Jobs' and Jonathan Ive's collaboration:

Translucency

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 characterised 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. [4]

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.

Colours

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.

Minimalism

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,[5] with a clear example being the iPhone calculator application, which appears to have been directly influenced by Dieter Rams' 1978 Braun Control ET44 calculator.[6]

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.[7] The more recent Airport Extreme, Apple TV, and iPhone designs have continued this trend toward a simple rounded-rectangle styling across product lines.

Dark aluminium

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 aluminium 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, aluminium face. The Macbook Air blends the aluminium 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 aluminium, this 'unibody' construction is aimed to reduce chassis size and the number of chassis parts required, along with increasing chassis rigidity.

Recognition

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.[8]

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 in March 2006 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."[9]

On July 18, 2007, Ive received the 2007 National Design Award in the product design category for his work on the iPhone.[10]

The Daily Telegraph rated him the most influential Briton in America on 11 January 2008.[11]

In July 2008, Ive was awarded the MDA Personal Achievement award for the design of the iPhone.[12]

In May 2009, Ive received an Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design.[13]

Personal life

Ive is married to a historian named Heather[1] and is the father of twins.[14] The family lives in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco, California.

He is an alumnus of Northumbria University having studied the Design for Industry programme[15] and was awarded an Honorary degree from the University in 2000.

Biography outlines

  1. Current Biography Yearbook 2006 / Clifford Thompson // Jonathan Ive, Head of the design team at Apple Computer Inc / Kim, David J. / New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 2006 / ISBN 978-0-8242-1074-8[16]
  2. Jonathan Ive designer of the iPod / Kris Hirschmann / Detroit : KidHaven Press, 2007 / ISBN 0737735333 [17]

See also

Sources

  1. ^ a b Father of invention | Comment | The Observer
  2. ^ Tangerine - Product Designers
  3. ^ Chingford boy is Mr Ive-pod | The Sun |HomePage|News
  4. ^ iMac 1998 - Johnathan Ive on Apple - Design, Architecture and Fashion - Design Museum London
  5. ^ Flankenlauf | Journal |Dieter Rams und Apple
  6. ^ Great Artists Steal: Is that a Braun ET44 in Your iPhone?
  7. ^ Apple - Photos - iMac G5
  8. ^ Queen Elizabeth gets ‘royal iPod’
  9. ^ MacUser: Life After Steve?
  10. ^ National Design Awards Presented At White House - washingtonpost.com
  11. ^ The top ten most influential Britons in America - Telegraph
  12. ^ Jonathan Ive takes home MDA award for iconic iPhone design
  13. ^ http://www.risd.edu/commencement_hondegrees.cfm
  14. ^ Profile: Jonathan Ive | | guardian.co.uk Arts
  15. ^ "Famous Alumni". Northumbria University. Retrieved 2009-10-03.
  16. ^ H.W. Wilson Retrieved 24.11.2009
  17. ^ USA Congress Library Online Catalogue Retrieved 25.11.2009
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