Jonathan Ive - Career

Career

After finishing university, Ive co-founded London design agency Tangerine. He was commissioned in 1992 by Apple’s then Chief of Industrial Design Robert Brunner as a consultant, then as a full-time Apple employee. He designed the second generation of the Newton, the MessagePad110, taking him to Taipei for the first time. He became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in 1997 after the return of Steve Jobs 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. Jobs made design a chief focus of 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.

The work and principles of Dieter Rams, the chief designer at Braun from 1961 until 1995, influenced Ive's work. 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."

Ive has his own laboratory with his appointed design team. They work to music provided by DJ John Digweed, a close friend of Ive's. The majority of Apple employees are not allowed in the laboratory. According to the Steve Jobs biography, Ive's design studio has foam cutting and printing machines, and the windows are tinted. Jobs told Isaacson: "He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me." On 29 October 2012, Apple announced that "Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design."