Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Kahney, Leander

  One of the things about Jony that struck Rick English was Jony’s dislike of awards. Or, rather, his dislike for receiving awards in public. “Even early on, Jony Ive stated that he was not going to go to those events,” said English. “That was interesting behavior because it was really different. He hated going up on stage and receiving awards.”

  Jony’s Newton MessagePad 110 was on the market by March 1994, only six months after the original Newton went on sale. Unfortunately, no amount of fiddle factor was enough to save the Newton, as Apple made a series of blunders marketing it, both rushing the first device to market before it was ready and hyping its capabilities. In the face of unrealistic expectations, the Newton never reached critical mass. Both generations of Newtons were also plagued with battery problems and the poor handwriting recognition that Trudeau mocked. Not even Jony’s stellar design work could save it.

  Phil Gray, Jony’s old boss at RWG, remembers seeing Jony in London just after his MessagePad 110 came out. “The Newton was like a brick in retrospect, but at the time was a handheld device that no one had done before,” Gray said. “Jony was frustrated because although he had worked really hard on it, he had to make a lot of compromises because of the engineering elements. Afterwards, at Apple, he went on to be in a position where he not only could influence engineering but also manage and control those processes.”

  The MessagePad also marked an important transition in Apple’s manufacturing strategy. The MessagePad 110 was the first Apple product outsourced entirely to Taiwan. Apple had partnered with Japanese companies before (Sony for monitors, Canon for printers), but generally made its products in its own factories. For the MessagePad 110, Apple outsourced the Newton to Inventec. “They did a really amazing job, it went really well,” Brunner said. “The quality turned out to be really high. I credit Jony with that. He basically broke his back, spent an enormous amount of time in Taiwan getting that thing just right. It was beautiful. Well executed. It worked really well. It was an amazing product.”

  That decision initiated a growing reliance on outside contractors to build Apple products, a practice that would become controversial a decade later.

  Soon after completing the Lindy project, Jony had an idea to simplify the design of Apple’s bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors, which were perhaps the least sexy of Apple’s products and among the most expensive to manufacture. Because of their size and complexity, the molds for each of the plastic monitor housings—and there were dozens of models at the time—could cost more than a million dollars to tool.

  To save money, Jony came up with the idea of a new case design with interchangeable parts, which could be adapted for several monitor sizes. Previously, monitor cases came in two parts: the bezel (a face frame that cradles the front of the cathode-ray tube) and the bucketlike housing that encloses and protects the CRT’s back. Jony’s idea was to split the case into four parts: the bezel, a mid-bucket and a two-part back bucket. The modular design would allow the mid- and back bucket to remain the same across the product line. Only the front bezel would come in different sizes to accommodate different-sized monitors.

  In addition to saving money, the new case would be better looking, its trimmer design allowing for a tighter fit around the different CRTs, making them appear smaller and more sculptural. Jony’s design introduced a couple of new elements into the group’s design language, including new treatments for vents and screws. “The new approach is more subtle,”22 said designer Bart Andre, who designed the actual enclosures based on Jony’s idea. His work seemed to attract everybody’s attention.

  Off to a Running Start

  Although he wasn’t hired as a manager, Jony stood out as a natural leader. “Jony Ive was very serious about his work,” English remembered of those early days. “He had a ferocious intensity about it. He was calm, but very deep. He was very serious, but also a really nice guy. He led in a quiet way: he inspired people to work for him.”23

  Jony began to emerge as Brunner’s second in command. Not only did he provide ideas and design taste, he soon helped recruit the next group of designers. Within a couple of years, Jony hired most of the rest of the team that would go on to make the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, including Christopher Stringer, Richard Howarth, Duncan Robert Kerr and Doug Satzger.

  Christopher Stringer, born in Australia in 1965, had been raised in the North of England. He attended North Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke-on-Trent and graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 1986. A veteran of IDEO—hired in 1992, he helped develop Dell’s design language and won an ID Design Review Award for an innovative light switch—he was recruited by Jony in 1995 as a senior industrial designer.

  Stringer worked on the early PowerBooks and tower computers. Over the next seventeen years, he would be involved in all the major releases (including the iPhone), peripherals and in even smaller projects, like the design of product packaging. He was also the first designer to give testimony at the Apple v. Samsung trial, where, according to Reuters news service, “Stringer looked every inch the designer with his shoulder-length hair, salt-and-pepper beard, wearing an off-white suit with a narrow black tie.”24 Stringer was often seen at Apple launch events talking side by side with Jony. The impression that they are close friends is enhanced by their shared history; both hail from Staffordshire and studied in the north of England.

  Richard Paul Howarth was born in Lukasa, Zambia, and graduated from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London in 1993. He was recruited by Apple in 1996 from IDEO and became one of the group’s main designers. Howarth was the lead designer of the original iPhone, and a major contributor to the iPod touch and iPad.

  Another designer from the United Kingdom, Duncan Kerr graduated from the Imperial College London in 1985 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a degree in ID engineering from the Royal College of Art. He was also recruited from IDEO. As one of the team’s more technical members, Kerr has great influence in the development and investigations of new products and technologies. He helped pioneer the multi-touch technology that led to the iPhone and iPad. He has been named in numerous patents, including various technical innovations involving components like proximity detectors, display modules and magnetic connectors.

  Doug Satzger was the fourth IDEO alumnus. Satzger attended the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1985. He started his career at IDEO as an industrial design lead, before moving to design TVs at Thomson Consumer Electronics. He would work at Apple between 1996 and 2008 in the IDg. An Ohio native, his interest in materials and knowledge of manufacturing processes made him the group’s design lead for color, materials and finishes, working on the first iMac to the latest iPhone, iPods, iPad and MacBooks. Satzger has been named in many patents, mostly in electronic devices, displays, cursor controls, packaging and connectors. (After Apple, Satzger joined HP/Palm as the senior director of ID then moved to Intel, where he’s vice president of the Mobile and Communications Group and general manager of ID.)

  When the design team looked to recruit a new designer, engineering and computer skills were a plus, but not absolutely necessary. “We are looking for personality, overwhelming talent and the ability to work in a small group,” said De Iuliis. “We also want to be impressed with a designer to the point of intimidation.”25 To put it another way, the group was more likely to hire a talented car designer than a mediocre computer guy.

  Another key member of the group in the mid-1990s and after was Calvin Seid, a native of Portland, Oregon, who graduated from San Jose State University in 1983 and worked for design firms in Oregon and Silicon Valley after graduation. He joined the Apple IDg in 1993 to design and manage CPU projects. (He died unexpectedly on April 6, 2007, of coronary artery disease at the age of forty-six. He was popular, and his death upset the team greatly.)

  Though distinctly international, the design team profile was largely white and male. With the exception of Seid, who was of Fil
ipino descent, the members of the team were all young white guys, most of them from the United Kingdom. There was one woman in the 1990s; by 2012, there were two women on the team of about sixteen designers.

  “Jony’s had that core of people around since then. They’ve been commuting up and down Highway 280 together for twenty years now, between San Francisco and Cupertino,” said Sally Grisedale, who worked closely with Jony’s group in the late 1990s. “They’re tight. They’re family. Many started as single men and then they had families and now all live in the same neighborhood.”

  The IDg was a great place to work; it seemed like nobody ever quit. But the lack of turnover was actually a challenge. Jony would admit to complicated feelings about the stability of the team. “Though we don’t want people to leave the group, the lack of movement makes it difficult to bring in fresh talent,” he said. “We need new people at regular intervals to prevent ourselves from stagnating. But this can only happen if other people are willing to leave.”26

  The Espresso Aesthetic

  With new and gifted designers in place, the Apple IDg started working on a new design language for the company’s products. The aging Snow White language no longer suited the growing range of Apple products. The off-white or gray color schemes, with lots of horizontals on the enclosures, seemed ill adapted to the plethora of new printers, handhelds, speakers and portable CD players.

  The team came up with what it called “Espresso,” a Euro-style aesthetic characterized by swooping organic shapes, bulges and an adventurous use of colored and textured plastics. Less a design language per se than a loose set of guidelines and best practices, Espresso was, in short, an aesthetic. There were no hard-and-fast rules. But, as has been said of pornography, the designers knew it when they saw it.

  The Espresso name has two possible origins. The official story is that it was inspired by the minimalist design of the modern European coffee pots the group used while working. The unofficial (and more likely) story comes from Don Norman, head of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in the mid-1990s.

  “The name was a derogatory term applied to the new design team, who had just installed a fancy espresso coffee machine in the studio. One old-time engineer said it was a sign of the ‘yuppification’ of Apple, and started calling the team ‘espresso.’ The funny thing is, the designers didn’t get it and adopted the term for their new design language.”

  One of the first Espresso products was the Macintosh Color Classic, an update of Steve Jobs’s original Mac, for which De Iuliis is given credit. Like the earlier Mac, it was an all-in-one machine, but De Iuliis lengthened its face, made the vents look like gills, gave it a higher forehead and made the floppy slot even more mouthlike. More bulbous and curvy than the original, the Mac Color Classic came out with a distinct personality. Enthusiastic users went crazy for it and turned the machine into a highly collectable machine.

  Its most distinctive Espresso touch was a pair of small, round legs at the front, which looked like the feet of a baby elephant. The fat feet tilted the computer upward by six degrees. As Don Norman put it, they gave the machine the look of “an eager pet staring up adoringly at its owner.” In fact, the feet were a kludge, the result of a lucky break. “Came from a fuck up,” explained Norman.27

  “Early pizza box machine was about to go into production [and we] focused so much on making it slim and flat we forgot about the floppy slot on the front. Not enough room to insert a disk with a keyboard in front of the machine. So we added a pair of feet at the front that tilted the box up. Had the unexpected effect of giving the machine a lot of personality . . . [and it] became a design feature that was featured prominently for five years.” The look would influence a later generation of smash-hit products even after Jobs returned, as the iMac has its origins in Espresso.

  Project Pomona

  Jony’s next big project was the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which would be the first major project to get started within the design group rather than one of Apple’s engineering groups. “At its best, engineering and design would work hand in hand,” Brunner explained. “Other times they would come to us and say, This is the product, just make it look pretty. It was already defined, you just need to put your styling on it. That was Apple at its worst.”

  Brunner wanted Project Pomona to signal a shift in development.

  “This was one when it wasn’t engineering driven at all. It was design driven. It was all about a certain type of experience that we saw and thought was important.”

  Launched in 1992, Project Pomona would be one of Brunner’s parallel design investigations. Just like the Juggernaut project, Pomona involved the whole IDg, along with a few freelance designers. The ambition was large: Project Pomona aimed to imagine the first computer designed for the home, rather than the workplace. The end result would be a triumph—and a disaster.

  By the early nineties, more and more computers were being used in people’s homes, but they were mostly beige boxes that had been designed for office cubicles. Brunner wanted to change that. “For years I wondered how the computer would evolve from a box into something more physically compelling that would fit better in the home,” said Brunner. His hope was that his team would come up with “concepts that would encourage people to select their computer the same way they would a piece of furniture or a home stereo.”28

  Brunner also wanted to move away from the heavy, oversized CRT monitors standard on desktop computers. Instead, he wanted to fuse a desktop CPU with a flat-panel display. “We thought that flat panels would become mainstream; they were already mainstream on laptops.”

  Brunner’s October 1992 briefing document laid out his ideas and criteria for a high-design desktop Mac. It was, in effect, a challenge to the group’s designers and five outside consultants to come up with the best concepts.

  Brunner kept it loose: His basic call was for a high-design desktop Mac, powerful but with a minimum footprint. Brunner insisted that all concepts use new materials in new ways, including polished or brushed metal, wood, veneer and different types of coatings and finishes. Not only were there a minimum of other restrictions; the designers were actually invited to step outside of Apple’s established design language.

  Brunner did add another interesting wrinkle to the project: He wanted a machine that couldn’t be expanded with extra hardware cards and beefier internal components. Most home users never bothered to expand their machines, so he encouraged designers to forget expansion slots, freeing them to explore much thinner designs.

  • • •

  The initial concepts were wildly varied. One was inspired by the design of a classic Tizio lamp, with the guts housed in the base and the screen mounted on an arm that hovered in space. Another concept hid the main display and components inside a metallic exoskeleton.

  One of the most intriguing concepts came from Jony and Daniele De Iuliis, who teamed up to pitch a mid-range computer. Their design had a homely look and their goal was to create a machine affordable for those with a modest budget. They called it the “Domesticated Mac.”

  To keep the price down, they based it on a CRT monitor, not a pricier flat screen. It was basically a Classic Mac in a funky-looking case. It was an odd duck, resembling an old-fashioned wardrobe, with three feet and twin doors that covered the display. There were slots inside the doors for things like extra floppy disks. Jony and De Iuliis also put an analog clock in one of the doors. Cleverly installed, the clock would flip around so that it told the time when the door was open or closed.

  Brunner created his own Pomona project design. His concept closely aligned with his prescription for a futuristic computer with a slim profile and powerful components. Brunner designed a wide, curved enclosure containing a flat-panel display flanked by a pair of big stereo speakers. It was a computer-cum-stereo, perfect for the kind of multimedia experience promised by CD-ROMs, then new to the market. To keep it slim, he proposed to use the guts f
rom a PowerBook notebook. It would be made from—of all things—black mahogany, like a concert piano.

  Since the other designers thought his concept looked more like a product from the high-end audio maker Bang & Olufsen than a PC, Brunner’s solution became the “B&O Mac.” The mating of a PC and stereo system was a novel idea at the time, and it generated a lot of excitement in the design studio. In fact, Brunner’s concept would trounce all other Pomona designs in focus groups in the summer of 1993 and, by the end of the project, was declared the winner of the Pomona competition.

  Nearly a year had passed since Brunner released his brief, but the group had a good idea of the basic shape and scope of the project. So far so good.

  To turn it into a real product, Brunner handed the project over to Jony in the summer of 1993. Jony had just finished his work on the Lindy MessagePad 110 and, when handed the B&O Mac by Brunner, he knew he was facing a tough challenge. Going back to basics, he started with the design story.

  “On a technical level, we understood the challenges associated with packaging a lot of components into a very slim space,” Jony recalled later. “But philosophically, the project was more challenging. Like the first Macintosh, the design had no predecessors, which meant I had to come up with a new meaning for the product. I wanted the design to be simple almost to the point of being invisible.”29

  Ultimately, Jony would keep the spirit of Brunner’s concept but change almost everything else. He redesigned the proportions of the computer. Where Brunner’s initial design was wide and curved and appeared to take over a desk, Jony made it taller and much narrower. He changed the size of the foot of the base (which was called the bale) and created a hinge that allowed the foot to double as a carrying handle. Handles would feature prominently in Jony’s designs. He redesigned the back panel, giving more room to the CPU and motherboard.