Essex boy who became designer to a generation
ASK most Britons to name a famous designer, and they will probably offer Sir James Dyson or Terence Conran. Although both are distinguished, neither can lay claim to something as generation-defining as the iPhone. It was designed by Essex boy Jonathan Ive, who was yesterday knighted for services to design. It’s strange, then, that Ive – or Jony to his friends – isn’t better known, but it is a state of affairs that perfectly suits the publicity-shy 45 year-old.
When his late boss Steve Jobs was still alive, Ive was always in his shadow. Jobs’ cult status meant that other Apple executives took a back seat. Yet Ive is almost as important as Jobs was to the company’s success. He has designed every Apple product since the firm’s renaissance, from the original Bondi-Blue iMac and white iPod to the iPhone and iPad.
Born in Chingford in 1967 and brought up by his teacher father, Ive was educated at the local comprehensive before studying at Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University. His lecturers remember a bright student who had little interest in computers; he took a first with some ease. After college, Ive joined London design agency Tangerine as a consultant for bathroom fittings maker Ideal Standard. It was in 1992, when Apple hired Tangerine, that Ive began dealing with the firm, then struggling in the face of Microsoft’s domination of the PCs. Fed up designing taps, he soon moved to San Francisco and joined the Apple staff.
When Jobs returned to Apple five years later, he soon spotted Ive, and promoted him to chief designer. The pair enjoyed a warm and relatively calm relationship, a rarity with the famously irascible Jobs, although Jobs’ tendency to take credit for Apple’s designs could sometimes wound Ive. Those who know Ive say his capacity for hard graft is the key to his success. Often working 70-hour weeks, he involves himself in everything from initial design to manufacturing, regularly travelling to China to oversee work in Apple’s factories; when working on a new product, he has little time for anything else.
During Ive’s first five years at Apple, his talent went unspotted. At the time, the firm was rudderless, obsessed with market research, constantly trying to conform to industry stereotypes in order to take on Microsoft instead of finding a niche of its own. Legend has it that Ive had already designed the Bondi-Blue iMac long before Jobs returned, but the then Apple management thought it too avant-garde.
Apple has barely put a step wrong since Jobs died, and much of that is down to his hard-headed replacement, former chief operating officer Tim Cook. But it is in Ive – make that Sir Jony – that the soul of Jobs lives on.