Professor Alex Milton, director of research at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has described the Germanic influence slightly differently. “British education is far more subversive than Bauhaus ever was—in a good way,” he said. Milton said more influential was Jony’s exposure to all the different kinds of design at Northumbria, from graphics to fashion. Being educated in a giant building with every other discipline of design would have had an influence on the way he would work in the future with multidisciplinary teams, including at Apple. According to Milton, “He would have interacted with fine artists, fashion designers, graphic designers . . . [T]his is something that all UK design students are subjected to—a very broad design education.”9
“There is a notion in Britain of a T-shaped designer,” Milton said, “one with depth of discipline in a single area but also a breadth of empathy for other areas of design. So the British design school/art school vibe informs how Jony Ive interacts with service design, multimedia aspects, the packaging [and] the publicity.”10
Culture and history have a place in the mix of art and craft to which Jony Ive was exposed in the 1980s. At the time, the nation transformed itself from a semisocialist state with strong trade unions into a fully capitalist one on Reagan’s model. There was a lot of youth revolt. Young Brits embraced punk, which encouraged experimentation, unconventionality and daring. It’s possible to read some of that independence into Jony Ive’s later approach.
“In America, on the other hand,” Milton explained, “designers are very much serving what industry wants. In Britain, there is more of the culture of the garden shed, the home lab, the ad hoc and experimental quality. And Jony Ive interacts in such a way . . . [he] takes big chances, instead of an evolutionary approach to design—and if they had focus-grouped Ive’s designs, they wouldn’t have been a success.”
The schooling would distill his work ethic and focus even more. Jony internalized much from his Newcastle experience, including his habit of making and prototyping. His DT education encouraged risks and even rewarded failure, exposing Jony to a very different model from the usual American design school format, which tended to be more prescriptive and industrially focused. If the education system in America tended to teach students how to be an employee, British design students were more likely to pursue a passion and to build a team around them. If this all sounds familiar, it may be that Jony’s education in Northumbria prepared him very well indeed for his later career at Apple.
“Jony actually came to Newcastle somewhat unusually; he missed his first day because he was picking up a design prize, which surprised and somewhat intimidated his fellow students. “The first or second day of college, he wasn’t there—he was picking up a design award for his work in high school,” recalled Tonge.11
In the classroom at Newcastle, Jony also encountered individual styles that influenced him. In his first year he took a sculpting class. The professor was allergic to plaster dust and had to wear a mask and rubber gloves, but taught the class week after week. Jony was impressed by the instructor’s dedication, but, even more, by the manner in which the professor treated the student sculptures. He took an almost reverential approach to their creations. He would carefully clear all the dust off the students’ sculptures before talking about them—even if the work was terrible.
“There was something about respecting the work,” Jony said, “the idea that actually it was important—and if you didn’t take the time to do it, why should anybody else?”12
Newcastle may be a party town, but Jony’s memories of this time are less than fun filled. “In some ways I had a pretty miserable time,” he said. “I did nothing other than work.”13
His lecturers remember him as a diligent, hardworking student. “His attitude to work was incredibly thorough,” said Neil Smith, principle lecturer, Design for Industry. “Whatever he did was never quite enough; he was always looking to improve the design. He was exceptionally perceptive and diligent as a student. It was never a case of just going through the motions.”14
“He Looked Like a Hairbrush!”
In his second year at Newcastle, Jony undertook the first of two semester-long placements with his sponsor, the Roberts Weaver Group in London.
At RWG, Jony met Clive Grinyer, a senior designer. Grinyer, who would become a lifelong friend and have a big influence on Ive’s life, has himself had a long and fruitful career, even rising to director of design and innovation at Britain’s Design Council.15
Grinyer and Jony immediately hit it off, despite the age difference (Jony was eight years younger)—and Jony’s weird haircut. He had a shoulder-length mullet with a fringe that was back-combed to stick straight up. “He had a little round face and mad hair sprouting out,” Grinyer said. “He looked like a hairbrush!”16
Grinyer saw beyond the hair and noticed that Jony immersed himself in all the ongoing projects, despite being the office’s most junior intern. “The amusing thing is, looking back, that even though there were eight to ten quite experienced designers there, all the work in the studio was going to this student! So Jony was already famous by the time I joined RWG.”17
Jony and Grinyer shared a similar sense of humor, and Grinyer liked the young man’s quiet confidence, even though Ive initially came across as shy and self-deprecating. “He and I immediately became good friends,” said Grinyer. “He was ego-free, which was very rare in the design student world. Most design students had lots of ego and very little talent. Jony was the other way round. When designing, he was clearly in love with what he was doing. He became so fixated on all his tasks.”
Grinyer had recently spent a year in San Francisco working at ID Two, the U.S. offshoot of Moggridge Associates, a firm founded by Bill Moggridge, the legendary designer who died in 2011. Another well-spoken and articulate Englishman, Moggridge is credited with designing the first laptop, the GRiD Compass, a now-iconic clamshell design of screen and hinged keyboard.
Jony was fascinated by Grinyer’s experiences in the States, and peppered Grinyer with questions about America. “Jony was really interested in California,” Grinyer recalled. “He was fascinated by the opportunities and the way of life there. Designers are always very aware of the culture of each client for whom they undertake projects, because designers are either enabled or inhibited by the client’s attitudes to manufacturing processes such as tooling and so on. And America represented a lot of possibilities for Jony. In the 1980s, the San Francisco Bay Area was a very attractive destination for European designers.”
Jony’s imaginative designs led to his rapid rise as the company’s golden boy and he was placed on an account for the Japanese market. In the eighties, Japan had been like China today, an emerging economic powerhouse. According to RWG designer Peter Phillips, the firm, then one of the top design firms in London, got into Japan by paying a Japanese marketing company to promote its work. The freelance company was expensive, as it took 40 percent of the firm’s fees, but worth the price. RWG soon received commissions for all types of Japanese work.
Jony was instructed to work on a range of leather goods and wallets for Japan’s Zebra Co. Ltd., a pen manufacturer based in Tokyo. Typical of his style, Jony made intricate prototype wallets out of paper. “I remember him folding and playing with these beautiful all-white folded-out wallets, all double-sided with the leaves,” Peter Phillips recalled. “In the corner he’d cut out the tiny detail that showed the embossing. It was an absolute beauty. The most incredible model I’d ever seen. It was stunning.”18 The wallets were one of Jony’s first products in white, a sign of the designer’s lifelong commitment to the color.
Phillips laughed that Jony, a teenager, was working on the boss’s “pet projects” while he and the other salaried designers slaved away on what he called “the dirty ones.”
Jony was soon tasked with a new pet project: to create a line of pens for Zebra. After making countless drawings, Jony came up with an elegant design w
ith a special touch that would earn him an immediate reputation in London design circles. Phil Gray, the RWG design director who had agreed to help pay Jony’s way through college, remembered the drawings Jony made for the project.
“He created some wonderful rendering techniques that were totally original,” said Gray. “He did some beautiful drawings on film whereby he coated the back of the film with gouache [paint] and then turned the film over and did some very fine line work on the other face, so that there was a translucent effect on the drawing. This effect was absolutely brilliant at conveying the materials he was imagining. When he sketched, he was such a fine draftsman that you could not tell whether he had drawn in freehand or used a radius guide. He was that meticulous.”19
Jony’s pen was to be made of white plastic with rubbery side rivets, like small teeth, for a better grip. Again, the product was white, but what set the pen apart from every other was a nonessential feature.
In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. The “fiddle-factor” notion may have seemed trivial to some, but the incorporation of the ball and clip transformed the pen into something special.20
“That was a new idea back then, to put something on a pen that was purely there to fiddle with,” Grinyer said. “He was really thinking differently. The pen’s design was not just about shape, but also there was an emotional side to it. This, believe it or not, was quite jaw-dropping, especially from someone so young.”
Jony made a prototype that so delighted his boss, Barrie Weaver, that he ended up playing with it all the time. Other designers at RWG noticed, and people started saying the object had a “Jony-ness” about it, a term that suggested an object possessed a sort of unknowable property that made people want to touch it and play with it.21 Ive’s talent for adding tactile elements to his designs was already emerging as one of the young man’s trademarks (many of his subsequent designs at Apple had handles or other elements that encouraged touching). His unusual pen anticipated the kind of allegiance that later Jony-designed products would inspire. The pen “immediately became the owner’s prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,” Grinyer recalled.22
Jony’s TX2 pen went into production, something almost unheard-of for an intern’s design. It sold in large numbers in Japan for many years and, in the memory of his RWG colleagues, was typical of the young designer’s work. According to Grinyer, “His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen a product like that before.”23
Back at School
After his placement at RWG, Jony returned north. He resumed studying for his degree but, later that year, he won a prestigious travel bursary (grant) from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, better known as the Royal Society of Arts or RSA.24 Established in 1754 in a Covent Garden coffee shop, the RSA is an ancient British charity, one of Britain’s oldest and finest institutions for the promotion of social change.25
The highly competitive bursaries attract entries from hundreds of students all over the country and each bears the sponsorship of a particular company. The RSA grants are, in effect, a recruiting tool, a means for corporations to find hot student designers. The first year Jony entered the Office and Domestic Equipment bursary challenge, the sponsor was Sony.
His winning entry was one of his major college projects, a futuristic concept for a telephone. The phone was a blue-sky project, an exercise in futuristic design, assigned to get the students engaged in What if? thinking. Newcastle put a heavy emphasis on emerging technology at the time, with technologies like the Sony Walkman altering existing modes of listening to music. Though those early devices look primitive today, such portable technology was beginning to become part of everyone’s lives. Every student had to have a Walkman.26
Students at Newcastle Polytechnic understood their careers would be defined by technology. “We were the guys who were told we had the job of bringing it into the mainstream,” said Jony’s fellow student Craig Mounsey. “This really was a core part of the course culture . . . [This is] why the course was so successful. We were encouraged to adopt and explore any emerging technology and integrate it into our designs. Further we were encouraged to speculate about future technology directions and their implications.”
In responding to the challenge, Jony designed a phone that was an innovative take on landline devices. This was years before the mobile phone became ubiquitous, and his winning design was for an innovative landline phone. Characteristically, it managed to rethink the standard image of what a phone was expected to look like. At the time, phones had a receiver with a headset attached by a coiled wire, but Jony’s resembled a stylized white question mark.
He called it, somewhat pretentiously, The Orator. The all-in-white phone was made from a one-inch-diameter plastic tube. The base contained the mouthpiece; the user was to hold the phone by the stalk or leg of the question mark; the curve of the question rose to the earpiece speaker.27
The design may not have been very practical, but it was great design. It won Jony a travel award worth £500, which, for the moment, he put aside. As for the phone, set designers for a Jackie Chan sci-fi movie got wind of it and asked to use it as a prop. Jony declined because he thought his prototype was too delicate for use on a movie set.28
The RSA hadn’t seen the last of Jony. A year later, he teamed up with his friend David Tonge to enter another student bursary challenge. This time, the business services manufacturer Pitney Bowes was the main sponsor of the competition, and the winner would visit the company’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.
In their last year at college, Jony and Tonge each had to complete a major project, largely self-driven, and a dissertation as a requirement for the Design for Industry course. Tonge was designing aluminum office chairs, while Jony was working on a hearing aid–microphone combination for use by hard-of-hearing students in a classroom.29 The hearing aid would eventually be exhibited at the Young Designers Centre Exhibition 1989 at the Design Centre in Haymarket, London, but for the competition, the two soon-to-be graduates were determined to win and so devised another product altogether.30
“We felt we could use both our skills to frankly speaking—win,” said Tonge. “At that time I was building two fully working aluminum prototype office chairs for my final project and Jonathan was doing his hearing aids. I guess we felt a large object was somewhere in between these two and our joint skills. And we were ambitious.”
Jony and Tonge were strategic about entering the RSA travel competition. They reviewed the different project briefs, effectively request-for-proposal descriptions that specified possible entries, before choosing to design an “intelligent ATM.” The futuristic ATM promised to be both an interesting challenge and a good fit for their combined skills.
They figured out how to work together to come up with something winning, aesthetically pleasing and useful. Tonge was delighted with the potential collaboration. “It was a scale of product Jonathan enjoyed, could control and excelled at,” said Tonge. “The level of finish was what was always amazing about his work relative to others. Others were and are capable of the conceptual thought and creativity but very few capable of that level of finish. . . . [I]t’s still the standout component of his work.”
Jony and Tonge combined labors to create a flatscreen ATM machine: clean, unadorned and, in the Jony Ive way, made of white plastic. It won the Pitney Bowes’ Walter Wheeler Attachment Award, which included a much larger prize than the previous bursary: £1,500.
Years later, Tonge, who went on to have a successful desig
n career at IDEO and now runs his London design studio, The Division, is still proud of their project and the effort they invested. “We did consider the relationship of the piece [the ATM] to users, disability and the space it was living in. It was a very polished piece of work that—without being arrogant—was visually and in detail way ahead of what most students and many professional designers were doing at the time. Hence, I think the judges were just bowled over.”
Jony, too, took great pride in his undergraduate work. For his final-year presentation at university, he refined the telephone he’d submitted for the bursary and, when he was ready for his final-year presentation, he invited his friend from RWG, Clive Grinyer, to come up and see it. Grinyer made the five-hour drive from London to Jony’s tiny apartment in the tough Gateshead section of Newcastle. When he arrived, Grinyer was amazed to find the apartment filled with more than a hundred foam model prototypes of Jony’s project, his design discipline on display. When most students might build half a dozen models, Jony had built a hundred.31
“I’d never seen anything like it: the sheer focus to get it perfect,” recalled Grinyer.
Grinyer said the differences from one model to the next were subtle, but the step-by-step evolution betrayed Jony’s drive to thoroughly explore his ideas and get it right. Building scores of models and prototypes would become another trademark in his career at Apple. “It was incredible that he had made so many and that each one was subtly different,” Grinyer said. “I imagine Charles Darwin would have connected with them. It was like watching a piece of evolution really. Jonathan’s desire for perfection meant that every single model had a tiny change and the only way he could understand if it was the right change or not was to make a physical model of it.”32
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products Page 3