Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  Initially they called themselves Landmark, after the Landmark Trust rental houses Darbyshire liked to stay in during his family vacations. They thought the name sounded properly grand, but they were promptly and aggressively sued by a Dutch company already using the name. “We tried to get them to give us a load of money to rebrand, which they didn’t do,” said Grinyer ruefully. After both sides walked away, the lawsuit died and the partners brainstormed a new name. After agreeing on the name Orange they found it, too, was already claimed, in this case by a group of designers in Denmark.

  It was Christmastime, and someone saw tangerines lying around. The name was abstract enough to mean lots of things, which the designers wanted. It also reminded them of Tangerine Dream, an early experimental electronic group that Grinyer liked.

  “Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened because Tangerine is a much better name,” said Darbyshire. “It was easy to remember, was understandable in major European languages, and the color was a positive symbol in Asia, a key target market.”12

  In the eighties, design partnerships like Tangerine were uncommon; freelance designers tended to set up shop alone. “In the late eighties, design graduates would have gone into what is known as an ‘industry of one,’” explained Professor Alex Milton. “It was an industry of designer–makers, or design art.” But Grinyer harbored larger ambitions.

  “A partnership felt more like a real business,” said Grinyer. “And Martin and I were always interestingly dissimilar—and complementary.”

  Based in Darbyshire’s house, Grinyer continued to work the contacts he had made working in Cambridge. They designed television accessories and hi-fi components and, thanks to some earlier work, were invited to Detroit to give a talk about in-car entertainment.

  “I was also writing articles for design magazines,” said Grinyer. “Our reputation was building.”

  Grinyer and Darbyshire made ballsy decisions about promoting themselves. They cleverly made themselves look bigger than they were: As well as writing for design magazines, they took out ads in the same magazines touting their work. The ads got attention, conveying a sense that Tangerine was winning big contracts.

  Grinyer and Darbyshire also started teaching at Saint Martins one or two days per week, which helped spread the name of their fledgling company (they taught several designers who went on to become famous, including Sam Hecht and Oliver King). They produced promotional brochures, too, in which they described their work as “products for people.”13

  They described Tangerine’s focus as being on end users, who tended to be ignored by other design firms. “No one was speaking about end users,” said Darbyshire. “It was all about ‘how to deliver things reliably,’ not about ‘what should it or could it be?’ This was the fundamental thing behind Tangerine that I believe we all bought into and worked hard to develop.”

  The combined marketing strategies worked. “My aim was for us to be among the three most naturally sought-after consultancies to provide advice on product design, along with IDEO and Seymourpowell,” said Grinyer. By 1990, they had enough steady work to move out of Darbyshire’s front bedroom to a real office in Hoxton, in the East End of London, in a converted warehouse. It was just half of one floor, rented to them by a female architect they knew; the timing was right. “My wife was also about to give birth to our first son, so we needed our big bedroom back,” said Darbyshire.

  The studio was a classic postindustrial loft, comprising a big, long room, with raw plaster walls and rough wooden floors. The designers set the decorating tone with some Philippe Starck chairs and IKEA desks and shelves. The Hoxton neighborhood today is a trendy area of central London, but two decades ago, tougher times had left a lot of abandoned and derelict light-industrial buildings. Hoxton was also home to lunchtime strip clubs—more like strip pubs, this being London—that catered to workers in The City, London’s nearby financial district. Grinyer’s car was broken into all the time; his radio got swiped, his tires cut.14 The London Apprentice pub at the end of Hoxton Street near the studio was a big gay pub in the area, which regularly had ABBA nights that attracted a lot of guests in silver jumpsuits. It was a lively neighborhood.

  Jony arrived at Tangerine as a third partner just after Tangerine moved to Hoxton—although he was twenty-three and barely out of design college, Grinyer knew “there was no question of Jony being a junior.” Jony and his wife, Heather, bought a small flat not far away in Blackheath, southeast London.

  When Jony joined Tangerine, Grinyer and Darbyshire were happy not just to get his immense design talent but a big client: Jony brought with him Ideal Standard, the UK giant in toilets and bathroom fixtures that asked for him personally back at RWG. But at Tangerine, Jony worked on everything, from power tools to combs, and televisions to toilets. At Tangerine, the designers worked on everything collaboratively.

  The work was consistent but not especially challenging or prestigious. Tangerine occasionally got commissions from big corporations like Hitachi or Ford, but most of the work was on small projects for random, obscure businesses. “It was a very competitive time for design firms,” explained Northumbria’s Professor Rodgers. “Companies tended not to specialize. They did everything. They worked on many things—packaging for shampoo, a new motorcycle, the interior of a train. They had to work on everything.”15

  Many of the smaller firms had very finite budgets and little or no experience in working with design consultants. Typically, they expected to spend just a few thousand pounds while Tangerine, still building its business, needed to bill much larger amounts. Often Tangerine’s proposals ran into the tens of thousands of pounds, way above their prospective clients’ budgets. As a result they wouldn’t get the work.

  The partners had little choice but to take the rejections philosophically. “Most work in the UK at that time was heavily about engineering, rather than user research or concept design work, so we were ahead of the market a bit,” said Darbyshire. “We had, on one hand, to flex and work with smaller companies designing smaller products all the way to manufacture, at the same time as trying to win business from the Asia and the U.S., and grow.”

  To attract and keep clients, the Tangerine designers worked to make the studio look busier than it was. They remembered a trick that RWG had used: When executives from a car company came to visit, the firm’s designers drove their own cars into the studio and put sheets over them, saying they were for a secret project.16 The trick worked and RWG had gotten the job. Taking RWG’s cue, if a client came to visit their offices in Hoxton, Jony and his Tangerine partners made sure the studio was stacked with all the prototypes and foam models they’d created on earlier projects. When the client left, the models would be put back in storage.17

  Jony, Grinyer, and Darbyshire designed power tools for Bosche and electronic equipment for Goldstar. The three designers gave their full attention to a simple barber’s comb for Brian Drumm, a hairdresser in Scotland. Jony’s concept contained a spirit level in the handle so that the barber could hold it in the right position while clipping his clients’ locks. It’s still sold for cutting single-length bobs and other precision haircuts. The job had a small budget, but, characteristically, the designers gave it their full attention. “Brian Drumm chose Jon’s beautiful concept for the hair-cutting comb, but I worked painstakingly to translate it into an engineering design for production,” said Darbyshire. It was ultimately worth it: The comb went on to win an award from the highly prestigious German Industrie Forum in 1991, burnishing the firm’s reputation.

  The Hoxton neighborhood suited Tangerine. Jony and Grinyer joined a local gym (Jony to this day does a lot of gym training). “This was old Hoxton, not what Hoxton is now,” said Grinyer. “So in the gym there were guys boxing while Jony and I were trying to get fit on running machines and lifting weights.” Jony’s old friend from college, Tonge, worked just around the corner and visited often. He remembered the area
as “very similar to San Francisco’s modern South Park neighborhood, near some tough areas but generally full of high-end professionals and a thriving work and art scene. There were also lots of hardware stores and raw-material suppliers, which made it easier to mine for the young designers in the area,” including Ross Lovegrove and Julian Brown.18 “The late eighties was a good vintage. ID was not yet fashionable so a lot of people were doing it for the right reasons—to make good design, not become stars.”

  A year after Jony joined Tangerine, the three principals were joined by a fourth team member, Peter Phillips. The men shared an interlinking work experience: A 1982 graduate of Central Saint Martins College with a BA in ID, Phillips met Grinyer at Central, knew Darbyshire when they both worked at IDEO, and had encountered Jony at RWG.

  “When I first met [Jony], he was just starting,” said Phillips. “My impression of him was that he was a really nice bloke, just one of these delightful gentlemen. He is what he looks like. He does have this very quiet demeanor about him. Very generous, but he wasn’t very serious, always had the ability to just laugh about things. But he was bloody good at what he did.”19

  Like Jony, Phillips brought some clients with him, including two electronics giants, Hitachi and LG Electronics. In the middle of the recession, LG especially was a huge win. The Korean giant had set up its first Euro design center in Dublin, Ireland, and wanted a European design firm. “We got into LG early on and all were very enthusiastic,” said Phillips. “It was fantastic and allowed us to design some great stuff.”

  The four designers were equal business partners in the venture. There were disagreements along the way, mostly between old friends Grinyer and Darbyshire, but they got through them. “Sometimes it came down to who could shout loudest but we always came to an amicable arrangement,” said Phillips. “It was something we’d brush under the carpet after a few minutes. Jony and I were the diplomats of the group, we used to say.” The young business also had to be careful with its finances. “We were sensible people so we never really pushed the finances too much,” said Phillips. “If we had a small overdraft or didn’t have enough money at the end of each month to pay ourselves, we would take less and do it sensibly.”

  The Tangerine crew in those days still made lots of detailed sketches and models. Many were made in Jony’s parents’ garage because of the mess, but others were farmed out. “We had a good model maker that was a stone’s throw from the studio who made sure the models were good and beautiful,” said Phillips. “Most of UK model making has gone bust now but they were great at the time. They’d be craft-based, and we’d go down there and discuss details.”

  Technology was becoming a part of the design process, but slowly. One Mac sat in the middle of the room, and, as Phillips reported, “We took turns to use it.” Tangerine was typical in this, as computer-aided design (CAD) hadn’t yet become essential to most designers’ tool kits.

  Emerging Style

  A voracious reader, Jony’s tastes ran to books on design theory, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and nineteenth-century literature.20 A museum-goer, too, he and his dad had made many visits over the years to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one of the world’s leading art and design museums.

  He studied the work of Eileen Gray, one of the twentieth century’s most influential furniture designers and architects. Modern masters fascinated Jony, among them Michele De Lucchi, a member of Italy’s Memphis group, who tried to make high-tech objects easy to understand by making them gentle, humane and a bit friendly.21

  Grinyer remembered Jony falling in love with furniture maker Jasper Morrison’s school of design, which was very architecturally pure, all straight lines with no curvaceous shapes. He was also fascinated by Dieter Rams, the legendary designer at Braun. “We were all inspired by Dieter Rams,” said Grinyer. “Rams’s design principles were implanted into us at design school—but we were not designing products that looked like Braun’s at Tangerine. Jony just liked the simplicity.”22

  All four designers were interested in design philosophy, but Jony especially. Because Grinyer and Darbyshire were teaching, they were interested in trying to articulate what the firm’s design philosophy was. Both Grinyer and Darbyshire had done time with Bill Moggridge at ID Two/IDEO; he was a big influence on their style. One of the key lessons was adopting “no strong ideological viewpoint,” recalled Grinyer. Another key for Moggridge had been collaboration.

  “IDEO had a consensus [system] so that everyone had to agree, and so Grinyer and Darbyshire were quite keen that when they did design work that everyone agreed on it. So they had a lot of reviews together about designs going forth, which was very good because it meant that you were testing yourself all the time,” Phillips said, “and that’s a really good way of doing it so that you are trying to please your client and at the same time you’re trying to push yourself, because you begin to feel yourself that this is something quite exciting.”

  As for aesthetics, there were influences, but the Tangerine group never clung to a style for its own sake. “It was important for all of us, including Jony, that we were designing things for a reason,” said Grinyer.

  “Jony was interested in getting things right and fit for a purpose. He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point for his designs. He had the ability to remove, or ignore, how any product currently is, or how an engineer might say it must be. He could go back to basics on any product design, or user interface design. And we all shared this similar philosophy at Tangerine. It was not so much due to our formal design education, but more a reaction to seeing the ways that other people were designing.”23

  For Jony, this represented a shift. At college, his projects had showed the beginnings of a design language, or at least a signature style, as most were in white plastic. But at Tangerine, Jony went out of his way not to put a particular stamp on his work. “Unlike most of his generation, Ive did not see design as an occasion to exert his ego or carry out some pre-ordained style or theory,” wrote Paul Kunkel, who interviewed Jony in detail for his book, AppleDesign, a look at Apple’s design department in the 1980s. “Rather, he approached each project in an almost chameleon-like way, adapting himself to the product (rather than the other way around) . . . For this reason, Ive’s early works have no ‘signature style.’”24

  Then, as now, Jony’s aesthetic tended toward minimalism, in reaction perhaps to the mid-1980s tendencies for excess. That had been the height of the “designer decade,” when the splashy colors of Culture Club and Kajagoogoo represented good taste. According to Kunkel, Jony avoided styling his products to protect them from dating too quickly. “In an era of rapid change, Ive understood that style has a corrosive effect on design, making a product seem old before its time. By avoiding style, he found that his designs could not only achieve greater longevity, he could focus instead on the kind of authenticity in his work that all designers aspire to, but rarely achieve.”

  Jony was not alone. Grinyer, Darbyshire and Phillips were minimalists, too, as were a growing number of other design firms. There was a global wave of minimalism, adopted by Tangerine and picked up by other designers, among them Naoto Fukasawa in Japan and Sam Hecht, another Saint Martins graduate, who worked on a lot of design for “no-brand, high-quality” Muji, the consumer and household products manufacturer. “In the contemporary culture of the 1980s, there was the cliché of the over-designed environment, where everything was a riot of color and form,” explained Professor Alex Milton. “It was a visual overload. Objects shouted at you.

  “[Jony] graduated in this period where there was a lot of over-design. Objects did not impart any of their owner’s personality. They were brands. And so designers wanted to become cooler, calmer, more reflective, and return to a sense of functionalism and utilitarianism.”

  Darbyshire expressed Tangerine’s basic thinking this way: “We were trying to make things gen
uinely better, giving thought to the visual quality, usability and market relevance of all that we designed.”

  Grinyer contrasted this approach to the work at other agencies, which tried to put their signature on their commissions. “When I was with Bill Moggridge, I saw lots of really good designers who could only design a particular sort of office-based industrial product,” he said. “When they tried to apply their same aesthetic to more mass-market, everyday products, they really failed. They came up with oddly techno products. And that puzzled me. I thought that design should be able to speak in different languages according to each specific purpose.”

  Advances in manufacturing technology allowed Jony and his colleagues to gently push the envelope. “The 1990s were a time when we were beginning to be able to decorate products,” Grinyer said. “Their form could be more interesting. It was no longer just about cladding electronics and putting the button in the right place. We could bring in more shapes, exploit the fluidity offered by injection molding plastics. We could create things that were actually beautiful rather than simply functional.”

  Again, this had a potential downside, which Grinyer witnessed firsthand working at IDEO. “Designers would often come up with merely a shape,” he said. “They did not think about the different functionality of, say, a computer screen and a television. I thought that was a mistake. We did not want to make something that was merely a beautiful shape. We wanted our designs to fit into people’s homes. And we were very much focused on the user interface of products.”

  For his part, Jony took an independent view: His priority seemed always to be the creation of objects that were beautiful rather than simply functional. He was constantly questioning how things should be. “He hated ugly, black and tacky electronics,” recalled Grinyer. “He hated computers having names like ZX75 and numbers of megabytes. He hated technology as it was in the 1990s.” At a time of big changes in design, Jony looked to find his own way.