Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and today we’re going to explore the history
of Jonathan Ive.
Where he came from, how he got involved in product design, some of his career achievements,
and how he ended up as Chief Design Officer of the most valuable company in the world.
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So Jonathan Ive is a legendary designer who was responsible for the look of some of the
most iconic products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and iMac.
And although you may be very familiar with the products he’s designed, you probably
aren’t too familiar with the man himself, since he’s known to be a private person
who avoids media attention.
But in this video we’ll cover what we do know about Jonathan Ive, starting with his
early years in the town of Chingford, London.
His childhood circumstances were comfortable but modest.
His father, Michael John Ive, was a silversmith, and his mother, Pamela Mary Ive, was a psychotherapist.
They had a second child, Alison, two years after their son’s birth.
Jonathan Ive attended Chingford Foundation School, later to be the alma mater of David
Beckham.
While in school, Ive was diagnosed with dyslexia, but it never seriously effected his education.
Ive was curious about the inner workings of things throughout his childhood and was fascinated
by how objects were put together.
He would carefully dismantle radios and cassette recorders, exploring how they were assembled
and how the pieces fit.
Although when he tried to put the equipment back together again, he didn’t always succeed.
In a 2003 interview conducted at London’s Design Museum he said, “I remember always
being interested in made objects.
As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on.
Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their
form and material.”
Although he recognized his passion quite early in life, it took him some time to figure out
what exactly he wanted to design.
His interests ranged from furniture and jewelry to cars and boats.
Ive’s father took him on tours around London design studios and design schools and young
Jonathan Ive took a special interest in a car design studio.
He later looked into attending Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London,
famous for their automotive design program.
But Ive found the school to be a bad fit due to the other students being, as he put it,
“too weird” since they were making ‘vroom vroom’ noises as they did their drawings.
He looked elsewhere for a higher education and eventually turned to Newcastle Polytechnic
in the north of England, Ive decided product design would become his specialty.
It was during his college years when Ive further developed his signature design style based
on German Bauhaus tradition.
This design philosophy embraced a minimalist approach, where designers should only design
what is needed.
And these were the same principles followed by former Braun designer Dieter Rams, and
you can see similarities in the products each of them have created.
Ive also received several design awards throughout his academic career, including the Pitney
Bowes’ Walter Wheeler Attachment Award and two scholarships from the RSA.
After he graduated, Ive took a trip to silicon valley to explore up-and-coming design studios
in the Bay Area.
He immediately fell in love with San Francisco and hoped he would return there sometime in
the future.
But until then, Ive returned to London to work for the Roberts Weaver Group, one of
the top design firms in Britain at the time.
Here, Jonathan Ive became friends with many of his coworkers including Clive Grinyer,
who quickly move on from RWG to join another design firm and eventually start his own consultancy.
But Ive remained at RWG and eventually experienced some troubles with the company, mainly due
to him being fresh out of college.
First, they didn’t give him a substantial raise that he requested even though his talents
warranted it.
Second, RWG declined a special request from their client Ideal Standard to assign Jonathan
Ive to their project.
They rationalized the decision by saying they had a studio of twelve designers and there
was no way they could send a fresh graduate like Ive to go and work with one of their
clients.
Jonathan Ive eventually left RWG out of frustration and joined his old friend Grinyer’s design
consultancy called Tangerine Design.
And although Ive had more freedom over his designs at Tangerine, they were often rejected
by clients due to expense or deviation from the company’s existing product line.
Another problem was clients accepting Ive’s designs, but reengineering them only to look
half as good as it should have been.
These rejections deeply frustrated Ive who poured his heart and soul into each product
he designed.
But in fall of 1991, a visitor to Tangerine Design would help change all of that for Jonathan
Ive.
His name was Bob Brunner, and he was scouting Europe for outside design firms to work with
Apple on a secret project called Juggernaut.
And Brunner was determined to get Jonathan Ive on board at Apple.
At the time, Apple was being run by John Sculley since Steve Jobs had been forced out six years
prior.
The desktop publishing revolution was putting Macs in businesses all over the world and
Apple had just celebrated its first quarter earning two billion in revenue.
With all this cash, Apple was expanding it product lines and Sculley was investing heavily
in R&D to speed up development of new products.
Ive accepted a contract to consult on the Juggernaut project, but he was still working
under Tangerine Design.
Apple wanted him to focus on developing mobile devices like tablets and laptop hybrids.
Ive went to work and produced something called the “folio keyboard” that featured its
own CPU, network jacks, and a trackpad.
He also created a transportable desktop called the Macintosh Workspace that had a built-in,
pen-sensitive screen, along with a split keyboard that folded underneath and to the sides when
not in use.
At the end of the project, Jonathan Ive and the other designers at Tangerine had developed
about twenty-five models that were reduced down to four principle designs.
Brunner was very impressed with Ive’s contributions and thought his designs stood out because
they weren’t based on anything that Apple, or any other computer company, had done before.
Now that’s quite an impressive amount of talent considering Ive was just twenty-six
at the time.
Apple then flew him out to their Cupertino headquarters to make a final presentation
and a job offer.
Brunner pulled Ive off to the side and said, “If you really want to create something
radical, you should come work for Apple full time.”
Ive agonized over the decision.
He had enjoyed working with Apple, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave both his homeland
and his work at Tangerine.
He also wasn’t sure whether his wife, Heather, would want to move to the States.
Now we all know he eventually took the job, but what’s more interesting are the factors
that influenced his decision.
He appreciated that Apple offered a supportive work environment where he could focus less
on day-to-day business operations and more on design as a craft.
Also, he had become frustrated with consulting.
Working outside a company made it difficult to have a serious impact on product plans
with true innovation.
And finally, he got to live in San Francisco, the city he had fallen in love with years
earlier.
In September 1992, at age twenty-seven, Ive accepted a full-time position at Apple, and
his first assignment was to redesign the Newton MessagePad.
The first version was a failure, but Apple was hoping to change that with its second
iteration.
Ive worked tirelessly on the project and involved himself in every last detail.
Even traveling to Taiwan to fix manufacturing problems.
But no amount of effort from Ive was enough to save the Newton.
Apple had made marketing and engineering mistakes that plagued the Newton until it was finally
discontinued.
So it may not have been a commercial success, but Jonathan Ive’s Newton was a design success.
It earned him four of the top awards in the industry and the honor of being featured in
the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Now during this time, Apple was experiencing tremendous financial success and had more
money than they knew what to do with.
But just three years later in 1995, all of that changed.
Windows 95 was released and cheap PCs began to fly off the shelves, undercutting the Mac.
In the first quarter of 1996, Apple reported a sixty-nine million dollar loss and laid
off thirteen-hundred employees.
This caused Apple’s focus to shift from developing high-quality, well-designed Macs
to pushing out the cheapest machines they could possibly make.
This was truly a period of no innovation at Apple, and it destroyed Jonathan Ive’s moral.
He said, “All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed
to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible.
I was about to quit.”
But before he could, Jon Rubinstein, his new boss, talked him out of it.
Rubinstein gave Ive a raise and told him that eventually the company would turn around and
they’d have the opportunity to make history.
And with Jobs return to Apple in 1997, Rubinstein was exactly right.
Jobs brought focus to not only the company but also Ive’s design group.
Because he was young and inexperienced as a manager, Ive wasn’t exercising much discipline
or leadership.
It was creative chaos, with each designer working on their own projects with virtually
no coordination.
Jobs refocused the design team and got them working together on a new project called the
Mac NC, which would later become the iMac.
The team only had nine months to get it from design to production.
To meet this deadline, Ive implemented a radical, integrated design process that transformed
the way Apple developed its products.
The workflow was so successful that it became permanent, and it’s essentially the same
system the design group uses today.
So the iMac was released nine months later and ended up being the best-selling Mac in
Apple’s history up to that point.
Jonathan Ive had finally found a company that gave him the freedom to practice his craft
effectively without limitations.
In fact, part of Jobs reorganization of Apple included giving the design team power over
any other group, including engineering.
And because Ive was head of design, he had a tremendous amount of operational power at
Apple, second only to Steve Jobs.
Jonathan Ive went on to design almost every hit product to Apple’s name.
Including the iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods.
But a fundamental problem with Ive has been raised quite often, and that is, what will
happen when he inevitably leaves Apple?
A similar question was asked about Jobs before he passed, but Ive’s circumstances are quite
different.
It’s his hands, heart, and mind that are directly designing these products.
And no one is quite sure whether his unmatched talent can be passed down to other members
of the design team.
But I’m confident that if any company could figure out a way around that obstacle, it’s
Apple.
So that is the history of Jonathan Ive, and if you want to vote for the next video topic,
don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.