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Jonathan Ive: The Designer Behind Apple's Look

“There’s tremendous pressure on designers to do anything except focus on the path of design,” he observes. “One of the dangers is that there’s a focus on trying to be professional, rather than being a good designer. But I’ve learned that if I focus on design, somehow the other things will happen if the ideas are good. You can circumnavigate all kinds of different stuff with a good idea, and that’s tremendously powerful.”

Famously media-shy and cocooned within a utopian design environment that he’s described as “heavenly”, Ive’s is an existence so exhaustively concerned with the pure nature of design that for his counterparts on the ground it seems almost like an ivory tower – or rather one made from twin-shot white composite polymer and laser-welded aluminium. After all, it’s talk of innovative processes, precise tolerances and advanced materials that extorts glimmers of excitement from this calm, shaven-headed pioneer.

“I think as a design team we’re beginning to get the hang of this,” Ive allows himself. “My drawing’s got worse and worse and it just doesn’t matter.” Ever since his college days – studying Art & Design in the mid ‘80s at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic – actual sketching has been a self-confessed weakness. “I was at college for four years, just at the point when computers were getting important,” he recalls.

“I started hand-drawing and had a horrible time. I was frustrated because conceptually, I couldn’t do something that I wanted to do.” For three of the four years computers were more hindrance than help, and it wasn’t until his final year that he had his first bite of an Apple Mac. He wasn’t to know it was the start of a long and monogamous relationship.

“I remember coming across this remarkable product. It was easy to use, and you could do little things like change the noise when you made a mistake,” he grins. “It sounds small, but at the time that was remarkable. I went from feeling stupid to feeling empowered – I somehow connected to the people that made it. The object testified to the care that went into it.”

Soon after graduating, Ive was to make ever closer contact with Apple and his mentor Steve Jobs through Tangerine. They were clearly impressed, and by 1992 he’d moved in with them in San Francisco. Six years later he was turning their fortunes around with the first iMac. Then the well-trodden tale begins: not only did it shift two million units in its first year, it made its beige boxy rivals look moribund and so last millennium.

It’s no coincidence that it was tender loving care and attention to detail that first attracted Ive to the brand that’s now synonymous with his career – the difference between superficial differentiation for its own sake and genuine investment in a better and more innovative product. From hidden horseshoe feet to the celebrated iPod one-touch navigation, his design team pours time and resources into getting it right.

By way of example, he draws attention to the new iPod shuffle – which ships for $79 in the US. Its extruded aluminium body clips together with a tolerance of 0.03 – a precision that, for those that need to look it up, is remarkable. “The way the parts fit together is extraordinarily tight,” he insists. “I don’t think there’s ever been a product produced in such volume at that price, which has been given so much time and care. I’m really excited by that, and even if you can’t articulate its value, at some level I hope that integrity is obvious.”

That inbuilt sense of intangible value has served him well through the years, and had a somewhat unusual genesis. Casting his mind back to his days at Newcastle Polytechnic – “in some ways I had a pretty miserable time; I did nothing other than work” – Ive picks out a personal inspiration figure faceless to the rest of the world. “In my first year, we had a class that was pure sculpture; an exercise in the translation from vocabulary to physical object,” he recounts.

“We had to make moulds, and sculpt the object from plaster. It was such an interesting exercise; so pure and so terribly focussed. What really struck me was that the chap who taught the class had a terrible allergy to plaster dust. But he thought it was so important that he’d wear these ridiculous gloves and mask, and spend whole mornings in the plaster room.”

“And he had these fantastic big brushes in his pocket. When he came round, he wouldn’t just stop and talk to us; he would make us brush off what we were working on and clear a little space. Even if it was terrible, and in our minds didn’t deserve any clearing of space, there was something about respecting the work; the idea that actually it was important – and if you didn’t take the time to do it, why should anybody else?”

Jonathan Ive was in conversation with Dylan Jones, editor of British GQ, following his award of Honorary Doctor at the University of the Arts London, 16 November 2006

© Nick Carson 2006. First published in Issue 5 of TEN4 magazine

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