In a roundabout way, Apple almost recruited Jony Ive right out of college. Ive, then a star design student at Newcastle Polytechnic in the north of England, had won some money at university in — what else — a design competition. The cash allowed him to realize a long-held dream of visiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He’d heard stories of the West Coast, and longed to see it for himself. He was in his early twenties.
He visited another star designer, Robert Brunner, who was running his own small but successful design firm in Silicon Valley. Brunner was blown away by some of Ive’s student design work and immediately offered him a job. Ive already had a job lined up in London, and felt obliged to decline. A few months later, Brunner moved to Apple and set up the company’s first internal design studio.
Ive had fun as a designer in swinging-eighties London, and loved all the challenge of constantly working on different products. He and his colleagues designed bathrooms and powertools, even a barber’s comb — which won another prestigious design prize.
But was frustrated and unhappy as a consultant.
He couldn’t see projects through to their completion. Once he handed his work off to a client, it was up to them to see it through to a finished product. As so often happens, manufacturers would cut corners or make compromises, diluting his design work.
He was also frustrated by the realities of running a business. He and his partners had to constantly sell the business and hustle for new work. They would fill the studio with prototypes and models if a client came to visit, making it look like they were working on very important projects.
So when Brunner tried to recruit him again, this time he was ready to jump ship. He joined Apple in 1992, still a few years before the company got into trouble and almost went out of business.
He was nervous about focusing on just computers: “I had been concerned that moving away from working independently for a number of clients on a broad range of products would be difficult,” he told London’s Design Museum.
“Surprisingly this has not been an issue, as we are really designing systems that include so many different components — headphones, remote controls, a mouse, speakers as well as computers. The issue has really been the focus on designing technologically based products. I love working within such a relatively new product category. The opportunities are remarkable as you can be working on just one product that can instantly shatter an entire history of product types and implicated systems.”
Surprisingly, one of the biggest factors in Ive’s and Apple’s success has been his continuing contractor mentality.
Apple’s design studio is structured and run like an outside design agency, but one that has only one client — Apple — and is located at the very heart of the huge company.
A big factor is the studio’s size. It’s small. Small and manageable. Apple has tens of thousands of employees but Ive’s design studio has only about 20 designers and an equal number of support staff like CAD operators (the exact numbers are very closely guarded secrets).
Instead of hustling for outside projects to work on, Ive’s team initiates most of the products themselves. The iMac, iPhone, iPad and dozens of other products were conceived in Ive’s Industrial Design Studio — not Apple’s engineering groups.
The first iPod was an exception. Conceived by Steve Jobs and his head of hardware Jon Rubinstein, the design team was only brought in late in the process to “skin” the device, after most of the components and basic functionality had been set.
But still the design team managed to make the iPod their own.
Ive and his designers made perhaps the most important decisions in the development process. They already had the concept of a circular interface, because they’d been working on mockup MP3 players since the late-1990s.
They made the iPod and headphones white, launching a decade-long trend of white electronics. All of Ive’s projects at college had been made in white plastic, and he brought this aesthetic to Apple, despite Jobs’ protestations. Initially, Jobs was firmly set against white devices, but the design team slowly convinced him to embrace the color.
The engineers wanted on/off buttons, but Ive’s team dispensed with them. They also got rid of the removable battery, a standard feature on many consumer electronics — then and now.
The team also designed the packaging — another first. Before this, no one in the tech industry sweated the box. But Ive’s design team spent a long time perfecting the packaging, designing a little unboxing ceremony that was become a cornerstone of buying Apple’s products, and now everyone else’s too.
Many of the iPod’s design features would be used to dramatic effect in subsequent products. The iPod set the standard for many later products with its sealed case, compact design and radical ease of use — all Jony’s team’s work.
It was Apple’s first touch interface (albeit a simple one). And the first mobile product in the Jony/Jobs era; its development allowed Jony’s team to perfect the design and manufacture of portable products, thereby setting the standard for seamless cases and sealed batteries that eventually the whole industry adopted.
But crucially, Ive’s group is empowered to see it’s designs through to finished product. Apple used to be engineering led, but Jobs and Ive switched the dynamic, and now Apple is very, very much a design-led company.
“Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” is available from Amazon.com.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of the Cult of Mac blog and author of four bestselling tech books, including a new biography of Apple’s head designer, Sir Jonathan Ive.
