A Rare Look at Design

Genius Jony Ive: The

Man Behind the Apple
Watch
OCTOBER 1, 2014 8:00 AM
by ROBERT SULLIVAN|photographed by DAVID SIMS


Photographed by David Sims, Vogue, October 2014
How Apples under-the-radar design genius, Jonathan Ive,
has found the way to our hearts.
I rst catch sight of Jony Ive across the Apple campus, in a
plain Dodger-blue T-shirt and white painters pants, in
conversation, nodding. The head Apple designer, who
brought you the iMac and the iPad and now, the Apple
Watch, has a nearly shaved head and a tightly trimmed
beard. Hes not tall, not small, and looks as if he might be a
formidable rugby opponentthough even from a distance
he comes across as open and amenable, less likely to tackle
you than to do what he is doing with a colleague at this very
moment, which is listening.
Ive has a calming presence, like the Apple campus itself,
whose very address, Innite Loop, lulls you into a sense of
Zen-ness. In the courtyard, trays of beautiful foodgrass-
fed steaks and fresh-made curries and California-born hot
sauceslead Apple employees out toward the open-air
seating, away from the white cafeteria that might be
described as a luxurious spa for the terminally nerdy. White
is the color of choice at Apple HQ as in the Apple product
line. It is through this white, with its clarity, its dust-hiding
lack of distraction, that you have already met Jonathan Ive.
To the south of the cafeteria is a tiny amphitheater, an
emotional site in Apples history: At the companys 2011
memorial for Steve Jobs, Coldplay took the stage, as did
Jony Ive. Ive is notoriously reluctant to give interviews, not
to mention speak in public. But on that day he spoke for the
man whom he called his dearest friend. For his part, Jobs,
when he was alive, referred to Ive as his spiritual partner.
I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas
ultimately can be so powerful, Ive told the assembled
mourners, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts.
Another thing Jobs understood way back in 1997, the year
he returned to the company that had kicked him out a
decade earlier, was that Ivethen still in his 20swas a
designer with the background and the psychological tools
not just to create the latest, hottest devices but also to
orchestrate a team. Like cutting-edge steel, Ive is strong and
persistent but exible, and most crucial (most Jobs-ian, in
fact), he is passionate about things, as in things, literally.
So much of my background is about making, physically
doing it myself, he says.
In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after
personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice
guy from Northeast London who has a soft spot for
woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep
their design talents backstage where they can do the most
good. Theres an odd irony here, he observes. I think our
goal is that you would have a sense that it wasnt design.
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When you sit down with Ive, he is eager to chattoo eager,
maybe, for the Apple time-minders who are always looking
around for himand will take a while to respond to a
question, smiling as he says, This is going to be a kind of
oblique answer. . . . We are talking in a white room,
distracted only by a black non-Apple televisionitself a
signpost to the question, When will Apple make TVs or
whatever will replace them? Noticeably, his phone neither
rings nor vibrates; he has designed the moment for
concentration. He nurses a white mug of tea, and the only
thing in the room besides an iPhone is the pair of reading
glasses designed by his friend Marc Newson and tucked
into the front of his T-shirt: simple, delicate, but clear and
strong. I wish I could articulate this more effectively, he
continues, addressing his ambitions as a designer. But it is
to have that sense that you know there couldnt possibly be
a sane or rational alternative.
Ive is obsessed over in design blogs, the sites that cover
Apple as if it were the Vatican, following leaks and rumors
and passing along hijacked photos of components or
screenspitching best guesses as to what Apple is working
on next. One blog imagines what it would be like if Jony
Ive designedwell, everything: Jony Ive redesigns . . .
freeway signage . . . Coke . . . the solar system. You might
spot the occasional photo of him out in the worldat the
White House for a design award; in London being knighted,
as he was two years ago, by Princess Anne; at a pizza
dinner in San Francisco, sitting with Yahoos Marissa
Mayer and various Silicon Valley execs. But one of the very
natural settings for the real Jony Ive is a workshop at Apple
HQ.
It may be easier to sneak into a North Korean cabinet
meeting than into the Apple design studio, the place where
a small group of people have all the tools and materials and
machinery necessary to develop things that are not yet
things. Reportedly Ives wife, Heather Pegg, has never been
he doesnt even tell her what hes working onand his
twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not
allowed in either. Work is conducted behind tinted
windows, serenaded by the teams beloved techno music, a
must for the boss. I nd that when I write I need things to
be quiet, but when I design, I cant bear it if its quiet, he
says. Indeed, the design team is said to have followed an
unwritten rule to move away from their work whenever the
famously brusque Jobs entered the studio and turn up the
volume so as to make his criticisms less audible, less likely
to throw them off course.
In 1985, the year Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive
was in design school in England, struggling with
computers, blaming himself. Isnt that curious? he says
now. Because if you tasted some food that you didnt think
tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong.
But for some reason, its part of the human condition that if
we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem
resides with us.
Despite that initial obstacle, Ive seems to have been born to
understand industrial design. He grew up in Chingford, on
the outskirts of London near Epping Forest, a good place
for a city kid who liked to play in the trees. His father,
Michael Ive, is a silversmith, and his grandfather was an
engineer. When Ive was a boy, his father worked with the
British government to develop and set the standards for
design education. When he made things with his sona
toboggan, sayhe would demand that Jony sketch his
design before commencing construction. As for the tree
house Ive designed back then, guess what? Today he is
critical. Id do it differently. His eyes light up as he says
it, and you fully believe, in that moment, that he would
happily drop everything to walk outside and work on it
now.
In high school, Ive studied sculpture and chemistry, and in
1985 he enrolled in the design program at Newcastle
Polytechnic, where he became known as passionately
detail-oriented, creating dozens of models of a hearing aid
to be used by deaf children and their teachers. By the time
he was out of school and working for a small design
consultancy (called, coincidentally, Tangerine), a project he
took on for Apple impressed the Cupertino company. They
recruited him in 1992.
Five years later, a disenchanted Ive was about to leave
when Jobs returned to reboot the then-oundering Apple,
which happened, by most analyses, when Jobs enabled Ive.
By Ives account, the two hit it off immediately. It was
literally the meeting showing him what wed worked on,
Ive says, and we just clicked. Ive talks about feeling a
little apart, like Jobs. When you feel that the way you
interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel
somewhat ostracized and lonelybig laugh hereand I
think that we both perceived the world in the same way.
Design critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive
partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design,
when manufacturers began to understand that consumers
would pay more for craftsmanship. Together Jobs and Ive
centered their work on the notion that computers did not
have to look as if they belonged in a room at NASA. The
candy-colored iMactheir rst smash hitfelt to
consumers like a charming friend, revolutionary but
approachable, and appealed to both men and women. I
think what we sincerely try to do is create objects and
products and ideas that are new and innovative, says Ive,
but at the same time there is a slightly peculiar familiarity
to them.
The iMac was followed by laptops in cool brushed
titanium, then white laptops. Apple was treating computers
and media devices as tools, as more than just wires and
RAM shoved in a box; they were not so much minimal
devices as devices that coordinate functions. And then came
the iPod and the iPhone, an invention like a divining rod,
tapping into invisible streams of information.
Throughout, Ive has rened Apples design process, which,
he argues, is almost abstract in its devotion to pure idea:
Good design creates the market; ideas are king. And heres
the next irony that denes Ives career: In the clutter of
contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to
overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on
increasing currency. I think now more than ever its
important to be clear, to be singular, he says, and to have
a perspective, one you didnt generate as the result of doing
a lot of focus groups. Developing concepts and creating
prototypes leads to fascinating conversations with his
team, says Ive. Its a process Ive been practicing for
decades, but I still have the same wonder.
For someone whose inuence on our lives is so huge,
responsible not just for shifting whole economies but for
changing the way we interact, Ive is extraordinarily low-
prole. Hes a virtually unknown British character who
became a central person in the explosion of the Internet,
says his friend the Hong Kongborn businessman David
Tang. Its amazing that hes not more widely talked
about. On the Silicon Valley social circuit, hes an
anomaly. The technology industry tends to feature people
with big personalities who like to talk about their
achievements, says Trevor Traina, a fth-generation San
Franciscan entrepreneur who is a friend and neighbor of the
Ives. Jony is humble and private, and he doesnt wear his
achievements on his sleeve.
Ive lives in the Pacic Heights neighborhood with his wife
and sons. Heather is a writer, he says. Shes a creative
too. We met at high school. I got married when I was 21,
and Im 47. Married a long time. Isnt it cool? Their house,
bought two years ago for $17 million, is by the storied
architectural rm Polk & Co.Willis Polk oversaw the
design of San Franciscos Palace of Fine Arts, which
opened in 1915.
Like his own father, Ive seems adamant about intention at
home. My boys are ten, and I like spending time with them
doing stuff that I did, which is drawing and making things
real things, not virtual things, he says. Easygoing Ive
morphs into Serious Ive on this point: He sees design
schools failing their students by moving away from a
foundation in traditional skills. I think its important that
we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it
directly, he says, to understand the properties youre
working with by manipulating them and transforming them
yourself.
Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own
hands that keeps Ive grounded. Hes not distracted by any
veneer of glamour, says Tang, who remarks on his friends
thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two
nely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved,
Ive-designed ashtraysTang loves cigarsconstructed
from the next-generation iPhone material. It was like
getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tang says.
Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously
inventive ways to use the technology at his ngertips. When
a presenter from Blue PeterBritains longest-running
childrens TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft
utilitarian designs from household objectscame to present
him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peter badge
depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In
repayment, he red up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer-
controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum
like an origami ower, and in a mere ten hours created a
Blue Peter badge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant
cousin of the MacBook Air.
His attention to detail is famous among his friends. Traina
likes to joke with him that he couldnt imagine being Ives
contractor, since nothing would escape his notice. One
time I showed him a 1920s Cartier crystal, platinum, and
diamond pocket watch that had been my fathers, Traina
recalls. He took a quick look and later referred to the way
the crystal was beveled, something I didnt even
remember.
Ives personal design tastes include the Castiglionis
Snoopy lamp and another Castiglioni thats a parabolic
glass that sits quite low. He likes his suits custom-made by
British tailor Thomas Mahon, and might show up in one on
the charity circuitat the Mid-Winter Gala, for instance, at
a table with Marissa Mayer and Alexis and Trevor Traina;
the Ives also cochaired the benet for Tipping Point
Community, an anti-poverty group in San Francisco. Ive
commutes what used to be 45 minutes and can now be an
hour and a half, no matter whether he is driving an Aston
Martin or a Bentley or a Land Rover, a eet of cars that the
British press watches like Apples stock price. He takes a
vacation once in a while, often in London, setting up in a
suite at Claridges while his family visits with the family of
Marc Newson, the Australian designer who has remade
everything from cars to furniture to restaurants to rst-class
lounges for Qantas.
When he and Newson relax, they do so by attempting to
switch work offtough to do when you design the world
though designers out for a drink will inevitably allow the
poorly designed world to seep in. Shit we hate, says
Newson, includes American cars. Its as if a giant stuck his
straw in the exhaust pipe and inated them, he adds,
when you look at the beautiful proportions in other cars
that have been lost. The two also relax working, as they
did recently on behalf of their mutual friend Bono, whose
recent auction of Ive- and Newson-curated goods raised
$13 million for (Red), Bonos charity to stop AIDS. The list
included Ettore Sottsasss Olivetti typewriter; a Dieter
Rams hi- (Rams himself showed up at New Yorks
Sothebys that Saturday night last fall); an Airstream trailer;
and a Leica that Newson and Ive lovingly tweaked together.
We didnt even have to vocalize our pet hates, we were so
in tune, Newson says. We only have to look at the object
and look at each other and our eyes roll. Its a
collaboration that is now a lock, apparently, since Apple
recently announced that Newson would join Ives design
team to work on special projects.
Theyre a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth,
jokes Bono. They nish each others sentences. They
nish each others food, adds Bono. The kind of
emotional and physical attraction people develop with
Apple products shouldnt really be possible, but take a look
around you. Friends marvel as Ive shifts from the guy
cracking jokes to the solemn Sir Jonathan Ive. Jony is
deadly serious, says Bono, who rst met Ive when Jobs
dispatched him to an Irish pub to salvage a U2Apple iPod
promotion. He is also serious fun to be around. When you
go out for a pint with Jony, its kind of like going for a pint
with the future, which is cool except you know hes not
telling you what theyve really got planned.
Feels nice, doesnt it? On my second visit to Cupertino,
Ive has nally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is
more watch than the computer geeks would ever have
imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex
wearers wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to meweeks
before the products exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO
Tim Cookin a situation room that has us surrounded by
guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite
all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel
it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say,
the weight of it, he nods. Because its real materials, he
says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the
magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but
solid snap, which he just loves as an interaction with
design, a pure, tactile idea. Isnt that fantastic?
At the beginning of our sitdown, he is slightly ustered at
the attempt to condense all that went into the device into a
single conversation. Its strange when youve been
working on something for three years . . . he says, shaking
his head. He describes the trajectory of clocks to watches:
from a public clock in a Bavarian square to timepieces
owned by royalty, to military chronometers, to the watchs
arrival, only at the beginning of the twentieth century, on
the wrist. Its fascinating how people struggled with
wearing this incredibly powerful technology personally.
The cell phone, of course, killed the watch to some extent.
Now he wants to reset the balance.
The Apple Watch is designed in three collections, with
myriad variations, from elegantly luxurious to a brightly
colored sporty version. On the back, LEDs emit light
through sapphire-crystal windows, and photodiodes convert
that light into a signal that algorithms use to calculate your
heart rate. Got that? All of this syncs with your iPhone,
making the watch the wrist-bound control tower of your life
in tech. Monitor your heart rate or your movement in
general. Tap to have Siri take a message, or send a voice
reply. Pay for drinks with your wrist (Apple Pay will be,
yes, Apple Watchcompatible). With this product, Apple is
moving from your desk and your pocket onto your person,
your pulse point.
The watch underscores the fact that Ive is rst and foremost
a masterly product designer; technology almost comes
second. Its a beautiful object, a device you might like even
if you dont like devices. Everything weve been trying to
do, he says, its that pursuit of the very pure and very
simple.
Aside from all the ways the watch connects to your phone,
Ive is very interested in how the watch can connect to
another human. You know how very often technology
tends to inhibit rather than enable more nuanced, subtle
communication? he asks. This is the question that haunts
the son of a craftsman: Is he making tools that improve the
world or shut people down? We spent a lot of time
working on this special mechanism inside, combined with
the built-in speaker he demonstrates on his wrist. You
can select a chosen person, also wearing the watch, and
transmit your pulse to them. You feel this very gentle tap,
he says, and you can feel my heartbeat. This is a very big
deal, I think. Its being able to communicate in a very gentle
way.
Whether it is ultimately judged to be a big deal or another
distraction remains to be seen. Either way, Ive eventually
leaves the guarded room with his secrets intact for a few
more weeks, passing through the bright white corridors
decorated with long views of the Santa Cruz Mountains and
a poster-like portrait of Steve Jobs holding up a Mac during
one of his famous hard sellsthe trademark bold product
introduction, the late CEOs big loud pitch.
As you watch Ive walk off, politely thanking people, you
recall that he closed up his private presentation by asking
you to listen closely to a watchband as it is pulled off and
then reconnected. You just press this button and it slides
off, and that is just gorgeous, he was saying. He
encouraged you to pause. But listen as it closes, he said.
It makes this fantastic k-chit. He was nearly whispering.
And when he said the word fantastic, he said it softly and
slowlyfan-tas-tic!as if he never wanted it to end.
This is perhaps Ives greatest achievement: not that we can
get our email more readily, but that we can stop to notice a
small, quiet connection.