Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  The model maker was very talented and his models looked “fantastic,” said Grinyer. They were perfect for showing off their ideas to clients. However, the models weren’t made to last. “When we got the models back, they looked fantastic but would break after you had used them once,” said Grinyer. “Apple had this pile of broken models they couldn’t do anything with. That was all a bit of a disaster.”42

  Despite the rickety models, Brunner was mightily impressed with Jony’s contributions.

  “Jony did a really, really sweet tablet,” said Brunner. “Really amazing. True to form with Jony, it was very clean, very sophisticated, super attention to detail. But still it had provocative qualities. . . . It was very developed, refined, sophisticated surfaces that were clean and beautiful but they still felt emotional. They weren’t dull and boring.”43

  Brunner remembered that Jony’s Juggernaut designs stood out because they weren’t based on anything that Apple—or any other computer company—had done before. They were utterly original. “They had an emotional maturity that’s rare for someone Jonathan’s age,” Brunner added.44 Jony was twenty-six at the time.

  After six months of work on Project Juggernaut, Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire were flown to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to make a final presentation. Since Phillips hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day work on Juggernaut—he’d been keeping the company afloat working for LG—he stayed behind.

  Both Jony and Grinyer liked the vibe at Apple, but Darbyshire found it cliquey. “Apple is a deep culture,” he said. “You have to want to belong to it. It’s almost to the point of being a cult, and I have to say I find that kinda spooky. There are fantastic sides to the culture as well: a great sense of freedom, constant encouragement to develop and look for something new to perfect, but also a slightly cliquey weird side that I find too claustrophobic. It’s almost a religion and I can’t deal with that.”45

  After the presentation, as they were packing up to go, Brunner pulled Jony to one side to speak to him privately. He told Jony that if he really wanted to “create something radical,” he should come to work for Apple full time.46

  “It wasn’t super overt,” said Brunner. “It was more along the lines of me mentioning that the opportunity still exists, and him saying, ‘That’s pretty interesting, let me think about it.’”47

  Jony did think about it, and back in London, he 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. But Project Juggernaut had opened a new window for Jony.

  “Even though I had done a lot of interesting work up to that time, the issues I encountered on Juggernaut were unlike anything I had dealt with before,” he said. “The principal challenge—to give personality and meaning to a technology that was still being treated as though it were anonymous—interested me a lot. Also important was the fact that Apple offers a supportive environment. It’s the kind of place where a designer can focus less on day-to-day business and more on design as a craft.”48

  But California was a long way from London. Trying to tip the balance, Brunner flew Jony and his wife, Heather, out to California for a second visit. On returning to London, however, Jony still couldn’t make up his mind.

  The opportunity wasn’t a secret. Grinyer, Darbyshire and Phillips pushed him to move to California. ‘We all said, ‘It’s a great opportunity Jon, how can you not take it?’” said Darbyshire.49 Phillips pointed out that the other partners all had children. They were “tied to London, and he [wasn’t], so it was a no brainer.”50

  Ultimately, none of the Project Juggernaut designs would see the light of day. Even so, the project was instrumental in moving Apple away from its previous beige boxes. Key ideas like split keyboards and docking stations (an idea that later came to market as the duo dock), as well as the gray and black industrial design that Apple became famous for in the early 1990s, were by-products of Juggernaut thinking.

  It also became increasingly clear that, at least in part, Project Juggernaut was an elaborate ruse by Brunner to recruit Jony. “We always suspected that the project was given to Tangerine to try and lure Jony to the sunny climes of California to see if they could poach him over to the States,” said Phillips.

  Finally, Jony made the call. As he remembered, “through some sort of reckless sense of faith,” he got to Yes.51

  Brunner had tried to hire Jony three times: when Jony first visited Lunar as a student, when Brunner first started at Apple and when Jony had just joined Tangerine and after Project Juggernaut. “He liked California,” said Brunner. “He liked the energy. So we managed to hire him on the third try. And that’s how you do it. You identify the people you think are great and work on it until you eventually get them.”

  Another factor was undoubtedly that Jony was frustrated with consulting. He had achieved what many designers dream of: a successful practice with a lot of freedom. But consulting also restricted his ability to truly make an effect. “Working outside a company made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate,” he said.52 In most cases, by the time his commissions had been accepted, many of the critical decisions had already been made internally. Jony had come to believe that to do something fundamentally new required dramatic change from within an organization.

  “While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation—I always assumed that I would work independently—at the end of this big program of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full-time position there and to move to California.”53

  Tangerine would continue to thrive without him, and work on projects for Apple, Ford and LG. The company is still running with Darbyshire in charge. In recent years, they are best known for their work on the British Airways flat bed, an innovative first-class seat that converts into a bed. Still, Jony Ive has gone on, left them for the world of Apple. His former partners remained philosophical, understanding that Jony couldn’t be kept back. Brunner tried to ease the loss too. Phillips reported, “Bob was very kind when Jon had gone and gave us a nice big beefy project to boot as a bit of a sweetener. It was a nice chunk of money to say ‘sorry.’”54

  CHAPTER 4

  Early Days at Apple

  I can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.

  —ROBERT BRUNNER

  In September 1992, at age twenty-seven, Jony accepted a full-time position at Apple. He flew to California with his wife, Heather. The couple moved into a modest house on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, the highest hill in the city, from which they enjoyed a stunning view of the city that extended the length of Market Street to the skyscrapers downtown.

  Inside, the place reflected Jony’s design tastes. “There is a fireplace in the sparsely appointed interior and a tiny television sitting atop an upscale stereo with a turntable, and virtually all the furniture is on wheels,” wrote reporter John Markoff, who visited Jony and his wife for a New York Times profile a few years later.1 “The room is lighted by a futuristic lamp, which appears to hang like a red orb, but there isn’t a personal computer in sight.”

  Jony bought an orange Saab convertible for the commute to Apple, about thirty-five miles away down the Peninsula in Cupertino. He went to work in the IDg studio on Valley Green Drive, a short walk from Apple’s main campus on Infinite Loop. The IDg studio was Apple’s first and Robert Brunner’s brainchild. The choices Brunner made in setting it up were auspicious and they’d have a wide-ranging effect at Apple (that would be especially true after Steve Jobs’s subsequent return).

  Previously Apple had contracted most of its design to Frog Design, a full-service design consultancy
run by Hartmut Esslinger, a hotshot German designer. Esslinger had developed a unified design language for Apple called “Snow White” that catapulted the company to the top of the ID world. However, by the late 1980s, Frog was starting to get expensive. Its Apple billings rose to more than two million dollars a year, twice what it would cost to use most other outside design firms, and much more expensive than running a small in-house design team. But Apple was stuck with a contract that Steve Jobs had negotiated with Esslinger in the early eighties, and couldn’t get out without paying a huge penalty.

  But money wasn’t really the problem. By that point, Apple had more money than it knew what to do with. The company was making vast sums riding the desktop publishing revolution. Thanks to the Mac’s graphical user interface, great layout software and cheap laser printers, Apple was selling boatloads of machines to newspapers, magazines and book publishers. At the end of 1988, the company had three factories working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Yet, despite a research and development budget of two hundred million dollars, Apple had no disciplined product pipeline.

  Different product groups—peripherals, portables, desktops and so on—did have the next generation of products in the works, but nothing beyond. Without any coordination between groups, Apple was reverting to the pre–Snow White days when each division had its own design ideas. Products from the printer group looked nothing like those from the monitor division. It was as though Apple was four or five separate companies. The company needed a regimented product pipeline and a new, unified design language to give the products cohesion.

  By 1987, there was a general recognition within Apple that the answer was an internal design team, but without a visionary like Jobs, the engineers had no idea where to start; since design had been outsourced to Frog Design, there were no designers on staff. Apple’s management first tried to find a superstar designer to replace Esslinger, thinking the firm needed someone with a world-class reputation.

  In early 1988, they embarked on a global tour of the world’s most famous design studios on a quest to find a spectacular talent. They traveled to Europe and Asia, interviewing design firms like Porsche Design Studio. They visited top designers in Tokyo, London and Berlin, but none were quite right. In Italy, they visited Mario Bellini (the so-called crown prince of Italian design), who rudely dismissed them. Not to waste the trip, a meeting was set up with Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who in the next decade would be named “Car Designer of the Century.” Hired by Fiat at age seventeen, he was responsible for scores of gorgeous Bugattis, BMWs, Maseratis and Ferraris and was synonymous with Italian style, having designed more cars than anyone else in the twentieth century.

  Apple executives visited Giugiaro in his giant, factory-like, ultra-secure Italdesign studio near Turin. They found him sketching with one hand, talking on the phone with the other, continually issuing orders to his many minions. The executives were so impressed, they gave “Il Maestro” a million-dollar contract to design concepts for just four products, which they wished to use as models for a whole line of products. Their hopes soon fell flat.

  Accustomed to designing cars, Giugiaro worked from the outside in. He would make loose, impressionistic sketches of cars, which his model makers would use to make 1:1 clay models. Often, the finished models would differ quite a lot from the sketches. Over several months, the Apple engineers discovered that the Italdesign model makers made many design decisions; a Giugiaro sketch was more inspiration than blueprint. That was the opposite of the way things were done in California, so when Giugiaro applied the same methods to the Apple commission—his model makers designed the computer casings using clay, just as they would high-end Italian sports cars—the lack of regard to the internal components meant the models didn’t translate to manufacturable products.

  Just when the search seemed fruitless, it turned into borderline farce. The Apple team went to see hotshot Swiss-born German designer Luigi Colani, one of Jony’s design heroes, who was famous for eccentric “biodynamic” designs of cars, motorcycles and consumer goods. After delivering a lecture at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Colani was asked a question about the future of keyboards and he launched into a long diatribe in which he compared keyboards to women’s bottoms. Since men like to grab women’s rears, he said, the keyboard should be split up the middle to accommodate different hand sizes. To illustrate his anatomical theory, he drew a woman’s bottom with keys on it and handed the sketch to one of Apple’s staff, who was almost too embarrassed to take it. Back at Apple HQ, the story spread, and one of the staffer’s colleagues brought in a female mannequin and stuck keys to it, replacing his regular keyboard. The stunt drew outrage from Apple’s female staff, but, remarkably, the idea remained and Apple’s computers soon had split ergonomic keyboards.2

  While the upper management searched for a design genius, some of Apple’s product groups had been working closely with Bob Brunner at Lunar. The projects included some off-line blue-sky product explorations like the Juggernaut project that Jony later worked on. Reportedly, Lunar’s invoices classified the work as “product design,” which indicated engineering rather than industrial design. In light of the exclusive contract with Frog, Apple’s accounting department wouldn’t pay for any industrial design work unless the invoice was in Frog’s name and vendor number.

  Meanwhile, as Apple’s relationship with Esslinger soured further, less and less work went his way. The billings dropped precipitously and eventually Apple stopped paying Frog’s retainer. At the same time, Esslinger was being pressured by Jobs to work at NeXT, which would violate Frog’s contract with Apple. Ultimately, Apple and Frog agreed to nullify their contract.

  That put Apple in a difficult spot. The company had dumped its design firm and its search for a new one had been a bust. Only then did someone at Apple realize they had their superstar designer right under their noses. Brunner had been doing stellar work, and the company had been delighted with everything he’d worked on. More than that, Brunner was more involved than the typical outside contractor. He regularly attended design meetings, even those that weren’t directly involved in his own contract work, and he had been pushing Apple to mature Snow White and transition to a new, unified design language.

  Apple started trying to recruit Brunner. They twice offered him the job of design director, but he wasn’t interested because Apple had no design organization. He felt the job would be a dead end.

  “I didn’t want to work at a company that wasn’t designing its own stuff,” said Brunner. “I didn’t want to manage people doing the creative work; I wanted to do the creative work.”3 By 1989, Apple was getting desperate and tried again, this time asking Brunner, What would it take?

  Brunner was tempted to take the offer. “Of all the companies in the world, this company could have a really amazing in-house design team,” he said. “It should have a really amazing studio. It has great products. A great brand. Great history.”

  He made a pitch. Brunner told Apple that he wanted to build a team within the company and turn Apple into a world-class design company. But he didn’t want to build a big, sprawling design organization, which was typical of companies Apple’s size. He’d worked with some big brands and found that their design organizations were too big and multiarmed to do really creative work. Because they were big, they tended to be bureaucratic, another obstacle to good design.

  Instead, Brunner wanted to re-create his small design agency, Lunar, within Apple. He wanted a “small, really tight” studio. “We would run it like a small consulting studio, but inside the company,” he said. “Small, effective, nimble, highly talented, great culture.”4

  Setting up a consultancy inside Apple seemed in line with the company’s spirit: unconventional, idea driven, entrepreneurial. “It was because, really, I didn’t know any other way,” Brunner explained. “It wasn’t a flash of brilliance: that was the only thing I knew how to do.”

 
; Apple agreed. Brunner, then thirty-two, joined the company as head of ID in January 1990. But the job wasn’t anything like he’d imagined. He was head of the design studio—and its only member. He was given a desk in the middle of the hardware department.

  “I got there and it was, here’s your cubicle, in a sea of engineers. I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’”

  Brunner’s Dream Team

  Despite his intentions to build a dream team, about eighteen months passed before Brunner began hiring in earnest. He needed to make the case for more resources with Apple executives but, perhaps more important, he had to come up with a cool place for the designers to work.

  “[The studio] was essential to recruiting talent,” Brunner said. “I can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.”5

  Brunner found part of the answer in an underutilized building that Apple was leasing at 20730 Valley Green Drive. Called Valley Green II, or VGII, the building was a large, low-slung Spanish-style stucco structure surrounded by a few small trees and a big parking lot. Not far from Apple’s main campus, Valley Green Drive is on the other side of De Anza Boulevard, the main road through the center of Cupertino. Almost all of the buildings in the area are leased by Apple, making this part of Cupertino look like a company town. Apple’s first office, on Bandley Drive, is just around the corner.