Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (3 page)

There is a notion in Britain of a T-shaped designer: one with depth of discipline in a single area but also a breadth of empathy for other areas of design.

—PROFESSOR ALEX MILTON

Renowned for its beer (Newcastle Brown Ale), football team (the Newcastle United Football Club), and horrible weather, Jony’s new home was a vibrant, industrial port city. When he arrived at the city on the River Tyne, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ran the country, and the mainstays of the city’s economy, shipbuilding and coal, were in decline.

Despite the rain and Mrs. Thatcher (she’d been really hard on the miners), Newcastle, located near England’s northeast coast, had a reputation as a party town. Roughly a sixth of the city’s inhabitants were students and the city center was home to many bars and nightclubs. In 1985, Jony’s first year in university, the British music scene was as lively as ever, especially in the North, where bands like The Smiths and New Order gained national attention. Within a couple of years, the city’s nightclubs would be host to the rave scene, awash with cheap ecstasy and thumping to the dynamic electronic dance music that Jony came to love.

Now known as Northumbria University, Newcastle Polytechnic was (and still is) regarded as the top college in the United Kingdom for ID. These days, the design school has about 120 staff and admits about 1,600 students from more than 65 countries.
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The department, then and now,
is housed in a tall building called Squires Building. “It was a rather brutal big building but was a great place for creativity in general,” said David Tonge. “It was shared with fine art, fashion and craft just over the corridor. This was before industrial design had become fashionable.”
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Each floor of the building is dedicated to a different design discipline: ID, furniture design, fashion, graphic design and animation. The department is well equipped with lots of tools and technology. “The designers are able to use a range of materials—wood, paper, plastic, metal, leather, kevlar, cotton, you name it,” said Professor Paul Rodgers, who lectures on design at Northumbria, though he didn’t teach Jony. “They have access to all these machines—drilling, sawing, fastening, stitching, etching, burning, you name it. And they receive really good training in those workshops, backed by a technical staff.”
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The ID department at Newcastle, founded in 1953, gained recognition in the sixties, in part because of its close ties to British industry. According to another alumnus, Craig Mounsey, who completed the course a year before Jony, “Newcastle had the reputation for being the best. . . . They won everything. All of the design teachers at school would parade the work from Newcastle as being the standard.”
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Mounsey himself has gone on to become CEO of CMD, one of Australia’s leading design studios.

The quality of the student body was another reason for Newcastle’s high standing. According to Mounsey, prospective students had just a one in ten chance of gaining admission to Newcastle Polytechnic. In 1984, 250 applicants vied for just 25 places. “We were effectively the cream at the very top of the new wave of school-curriculum-trained designers,” said Mounsey. “It was humbling.”

The first year at Newcastle was split between learning practical skills and academic classes, with a focus on design psychology. “The first year is a rapid upskilling program,” explained Rodgers.

“Students were taught how to think like a designer. One of the first projects was to design two rooms using nothing but several simple geometric shapes: a sphere, cube, tetrahedron and a cone. We had to create one room which would invite the user in and make them feel like they would never want to leave,” recalled Mounsey. “The other had to be intimidating and be a place you would want to leave. Polar opposites.” The most important part of the project was a report justifying the student’s decisions. “The first year was all about thinking, research and abstract design language,” said Mounsey.

Students were also required to master hands-on design skills, an emphasis that has continued to this day with the school’s focus on project-based learning. Students at Northumbria traditionally spend a lot of time learning how to make things. They are taught how to sketch and draw; and how to operate drills, lathes and computer-controlled cutting machines. They are also given time and freedom to experiment with some of the materials and resources in the school and develop a really deep understanding of what they can do with materials. Throughout this time, the emphasis is on creating and making.

“It’s no nonsense,” said Professor Rodgers. “We teach the fundamentals. There’s lots of emphasis placed . . . on the manipulation of materials.”

Another key part of the program is the requirement that students complete two “placements”—in effect, internships—with outside companies. During the middle two years of the four-year program, all the students work in placements in the second and third years. This academic structure is known as a “sandwich” course.
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While many technical colleges offer placements, most require just one. Northumbria attracts some of the most talented students in the country because of this double-sandwich course structure. Students have taken placements with Phillips, Kenwood, Puma, Lego, Alpine Electronics and Electrolux,
among many others, or were placed with design firms and consultancies, including Seymour Powell, Octo Design and DCA Design International.
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The program was the same in Jony’s time. “It was unusual,” said David Tonge, one of Jony’s classmates and a close friend. “[The placements] made you much smarter and wiser when you returned. The cumulative effect of everyone doing this and bringing experiences back is huge. Effectively you leave the course with a year or so experience . . . Of course, it’s a big leap over other graduates [from other universities].”

The rigor of the coursework and placements give the graduates an advantage in both craftsmanship and the discipline of ID. According to Professor Rogers, “When you look at a Northumbria project and compare it to another institution in the UK, the attention to detail and the making of the artifact is always very, very strong. The things themselves . . . are made to a very high level of detail.”

The contrast to Goldsmiths, the famous arts and humanities college in London, is illuminating. Goldsmiths is well known for fostering a generation of high-profile British artists called collectively the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
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The YBAs are famous for stirring up controversy and provoking outrage. Hirst pickled dead sharks in formaldehyde and Emin created an art-gallery installation of her unmade bed, which included a used condom.

Based in New Cross in south London, Goldsmiths is big city, intellectual, and artistic to a fault. In comparison, Newcastle is blue collar, brass tacks, and a get-your-hands-dirty-making-things kind of place. “At Goldsmiths, the focus is on the idea, the concept,” said a Northumbria professor, who asked not to be named. “Northumbria focuses on the object, the artifact. I think, being rather crude here, the focus of the Northumbria graduate is on the detail, and the manufacture
and the craftsmanship of producing the object; and a Goldsmith’s student would be much more about interrogating a notional product, from a particular conceptual, contextual point of view. In my crude comparison, the Goldsmiths student thinks a lot about what they are doing, whereas the Northumbria student gets on and does it.”

The design education Jony encountered at Newcastle was based on a Germanic approach, according to Professor Penny Sparke, pro vice chancellor at Kingston University and a writer about design. “The German Bauhaus of the 1920s was picked up by British design education in the 1950s,” she said. “For example, they had what was called a foundation year in Bauhaus, and British design also has a foundation year. The idea of the foundation year was that students started from scratch; they did not build on the past but started on an empty page.
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The minimalist principle that designers should only design what is needed also was derived from the German pedagogic tradition. And Ive’s design philosophy seems very conscious of that. Both Ive and Braun came out of the same Bauhaus tradition, as have lots of German companies such as kitchen equipment companies, electronics companies—it is quite established in the technological end of German design. There is a vein of high quality, high technology and minimalism. Ive probably imbibed these influences through his education.”

Professor Alex Milton, director of research at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has described the Germanic influence slightly differently. “British education is far more subversive than Bauhaus ever was—in a good way,” he said. Milton said more influential was Jony’s exposure to all the different kinds of design at Northumbria, from graphics to fashion. Being educated in a giant building with every other discipline of design would have had an influence on the way he would work in the
future with multidisciplinary teams, including at Apple. According to Milton, “He would have interacted with fine artists, fashion designers, graphic designers . . . [T]his is something that all UK design students are subjected to—a very broad design education.”
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“There is a notion in Britain of a T-shaped designer,” Milton said, “one with depth of discipline in a single area but also a breadth of empathy for other areas of design. So the British design school/art school vibe informs how Jony Ive interacts with service design, multimedia aspects, the packaging [and] the publicity.”
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Culture and history have a place in the mix of art and craft to which Jony Ive was exposed in the 1980s. At the time, the nation transformed itself from a semisocialist state with strong trade unions into a fully capitalist one on Reagan’s model. There was a lot of youth revolt. Young Brits embraced punk, which encouraged experimentation, unconventionality and daring. It’s possible to read some of that independence into Jony Ive’s later approach.

“In America, on the other hand,” Milton explained, “designers are very much serving what industry wants. In Britain, there is more of the culture of the garden shed, the home lab, the ad hoc and experimental quality. And Jony Ive interacts in such a way . . . [he] takes big chances, instead of an evolutionary approach to design—and if they had focus-grouped Ive’s designs, they wouldn’t have been a success.”

The schooling would distill his work ethic and focus even more. Jony internalized much from his Newcastle experience, including his habit of making and prototyping. His DT education encouraged risks and even rewarded failure, exposing Jony to a very different model from the usual American design school format, which tended to be more prescriptive and industrially focused. If the education system in America tended to teach students how to be an employee, British design students
were more likely to pursue a passion and to build a team around them. If this all sounds familiar, it may be that Jony’s education in Northumbria prepared him very well indeed for his later career at Apple.

“Jony actually came to Newcastle somewhat unusually; he missed his first day because he was picking up a design prize, which surprised and somewhat intimidated his fellow students. “The first or second day of college, he wasn’t there—he was picking up a design award for his work in high school,” recalled Tonge.
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In the classroom at Newcastle, Jony also encountered individual styles that influenced him. In his first year he took a sculpting class. The professor was allergic to plaster dust and had to wear a mask and rubber gloves, but taught the class week after week. Jony was impressed by the instructor’s dedication, but, even more, by the manner in which the professor treated the student sculptures. He took an almost reverential approach to their creations. He would carefully clear all the dust off the students’ sculptures before talking about them—even if the work was terrible.

“There was something about respecting the work,” Jony said, “the idea that actually it was important—and if you didn’t take the time to do it, why should anybody else?”
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Newcastle may be a party town, but Jony’s memories of this time are less than fun filled. “In some ways I had a pretty miserable time,” he said. “I did nothing other than work.”
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His lecturers remember him as a diligent, hardworking student. “His attitude to work was incredibly thorough,” said Neil Smith, principle lecturer, Design for Industry. “Whatever he did was never quite enough; he was always looking to improve the design. He was exceptionally perceptive and diligent as a student. It was never a case of just going through the motions.”
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In his second year at Newcastle, Jony undertook the first of two semester-long placements with his sponsor, the Roberts Weaver Group in London.

At RWG, Jony met Clive Grinyer, a senior designer. Grinyer, who would become a lifelong friend and have a big influence on Ive’s life, has himself had a long and fruitful career, even rising to director of design and innovation at Britain’s Design Council.
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Grinyer and Jony immediately hit it off, despite the age difference (Jony was eight years younger)—and Jony’s weird haircut. He had a shoulder-length mullet with a fringe that was back-combed to stick straight up. “He had a little round face and mad hair sprouting out,” Grinyer said. “He looked like a hairbrush!”
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Grinyer saw beyond the hair and noticed that Jony immersed himself in all the ongoing projects, despite being the office’s most junior intern. “The amusing thing is, looking back, that even though there were eight to ten quite experienced designers there, all the work in the studio was going to this student! So Jony was already famous by the time I joined RWG.”
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Jony and Grinyer shared a similar sense of humor, and Grinyer liked the young man’s quiet confidence, even though Ive initially came across as shy and self-deprecating. “He and I immediately became good friends,” said Grinyer. “He was ego-free, which was very rare in the design student world. Most design students had lots of ego and very little talent. Jony was the other way round. When designing, he was clearly in love with what he was doing. He became so fixated on all his tasks.”

Grinyer had recently spent a year in San Francisco working at ID Two, the U.S. offshoot of Moggridge Associates, a firm founded by Bill Moggridge, the legendary designer who died in 2011. Another well-spoken and articulate Englishman, Moggridge is credited with designing
the first laptop, the GRiD Compass, a now-iconic clamshell design of screen and hinged keyboard.

Jony was fascinated by Grinyer’s experiences in the States, and peppered Grinyer with questions about America. “Jony was really interested in California,” Grinyer recalled. “He was fascinated by the opportunities and the way of life there. Designers are always very aware of the culture of each client for whom they undertake projects, because designers are either enabled or inhibited by the client’s attitudes to manufacturing processes such as tooling and so on. And America represented a lot of possibilities for Jony. In the 1980s, the San Francisco Bay Area was a very attractive destination for European designers.”

Jony’s imaginative designs led to his rapid rise as the company’s golden boy and he was placed on an account for the Japanese market. In the eighties, Japan had been like China today, an emerging economic powerhouse. According to RWG designer Peter Phillips, the firm, then one of the top design firms in London, got into Japan by paying a Japanese marketing company to promote its work. The freelance company was expensive, as it took 40 percent of the firm’s fees, but worth the price. RWG soon received commissions for all types of Japanese work.

Jony was instructed to work on a range of leather goods and wallets for Japan’s Zebra Co. Ltd., a pen manufacturer based in Tokyo. Typical of his style, Jony made intricate prototype wallets out of paper. “I remember him folding and playing with these beautiful all-white folded-out wallets, all double-sided with the leaves,” Peter Phillips recalled. “In the corner he’d cut out the tiny detail that showed the embossing. It was an absolute beauty. The most incredible model I’d ever seen. It was stunning.”
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The wallets were one of Jony’s first products in white, a sign of the designer’s lifelong commitment to the color.

Phillips laughed that Jony, a teenager, was working on the boss’s “pet
projects” while he and the other salaried designers slaved away on what he called “the dirty ones.”

Jony was soon tasked with a new pet project: to create a line of pens for Zebra. After making countless drawings, Jony came up with an elegant design with a special touch that would earn him an immediate reputation in London design circles. Phil Gray, the RWG design director who had agreed to help pay Jony’s way through college, remembered the drawings Jony made for the project.

“He created some wonderful rendering techniques that were totally original,” said Gray. “He did some beautiful drawings on film whereby he coated the back of the film with gouache [paint] and then turned the film over and did some very fine line work on the other face, so that there was a translucent effect on the drawing. This effect was absolutely brilliant at conveying the materials he was imagining. When he sketched, he was such a fine draftsman that you could not tell whether he had drawn in freehand or used a radius guide. He was that meticulous.”
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Jony’s pen was to be made of white plastic with rubbery side rivets, like small teeth, for a better grip. Again, the product was white, but what set the pen apart from every other was a nonessential feature.

In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. The “fiddle-factor” notion may have seemed trivial to some, but the incorporation of the ball and clip transformed the pen into something special.
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“That was a new idea back then, to put something on a pen that was purely there to fiddle with,” Grinyer said. “He was really thinking
differently. The pen’s design was not just about shape, but also there was an emotional side to it. This, believe it or not, was quite jaw-dropping, especially from someone so young.”

Jony made a prototype that so delighted his boss, Barrie Weaver, that he ended up playing with it all the time. Other designers at RWG noticed, and people started saying the object had a “Jony-ness” about it, a term that suggested an object possessed a sort of unknowable property that made people want to touch it and play with it.
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Ive’s talent for adding tactile elements to his designs was already emerging as one of the young man’s trademarks (many of his subsequent designs at Apple had handles or other elements that encouraged touching). His unusual pen anticipated the kind of allegiance that later Jony-designed products would inspire. The pen “immediately became the owner’s prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,” Grinyer recalled.
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Jony’s TX2 pen went into production, something almost unheard-of for an intern’s design. It sold in large numbers in Japan for many years and, in the memory of his RWG colleagues, was typical of the young designer’s work. According to Grinyer, “His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen a product like that before.”
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