A version of this article originally appeared in Gear Patrol Magazine with the headline “The Ive Touch.” Subscribe today
At Apple, Jony Ive transformed tech products from bland, clunky gadgets to sleek, sexy and very mainstream objects of desire. Start here, with his greatest hits, and soon you’ll see his signature design language everywhere you look.
When Apple announced in June that Jony Ive, the company’s chief design officer and Steve Jobs’s “spiritual partner,” would be leaving the company after nearly three decades, the tech world let out a collective audible gasp. Ive is responsible for some of the most iconic modern products ever created — by Apple, or anyone else. The iMac. The iPod. The iPhone, iPad and the Apple Watch. It was Ive, along with the late Jobs, who helped drag Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy in the late ‘90s before turning it into the world’s most valuable company.
Ive started at Apple in 1992, when the company was struggling financially and Jobs was off running NeXT. When Jobs returned in 1997 he immediately promoted Ive, who had been thinking about leaving the company, to run Apple’s product design team. His first assignment: turn the “boring beige box” Macintosh 128K into something cheaper, prettier and more popular.
Ive responded with the iMac. Released in 1998, it showcased his new design direction for the brand: fun and accessibility. Instead of focusing on hard-to-understand specs like chip speeds and RAM, Apple would deliver products that “dispensed positive emotions,” according to Leander Kahney in Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. The iMac was transparent and colorful, like a big gumball dispenser. There was nothing else like it, or even close.
Over the next two decades, Ive leaned into the feel-good factor while designing products that were meant to be equal parts beautiful and functional — and often, as with the iPod, iPhone and more, landing on forms that were truly ground-breaking. Ive refined the minimalist and simplistic approach of his idol, the industrial designer Dieter Rams, along the way developing an obsession with thinness and rounded edges, two of many hallmarks that have become synonymous with Apple’s now-iconic design language.
That the most influential product designer in the world is leaving Apple raises many questions about its future. But don’t expect answers any time soon. As Jon Gruber, among the most fervent journalists who cover Apple, wrote in a recent Daring Fireball article: “We’ll still be seeing Ive-designed hardware five years from now. It is going to take a long time to evaluate his absence.”
Recognizing his genius, on the other hand, is quite simple indeed.
