Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (5 page)

True to his promise to return to the Roberts Weaver Group, Jony, along with wife Heather, moved from Newcastle to London. His decision to join Roberts Weaver came as something of a surprise to his new boss, Phil Gray, who knew of his other job offers. “He was already being recognized as a very talented ‘Young Designer,’” said Gray. “As an honorable person, he accepted our offer—even though he had plenty of other offers at the time.”

Joining RWG was more than a consolation prize; Roberts Weaver was one of the top design firms in Britain. Jony joined a talented team and
quickly made friends, establishing some relationships that survive today. His friend Grinyer had moved on at that point, quitting to join another design firm near Cambridge, but RWG won several design awards in the late eighties.

Like a lot of consultancies of its kind, the company worked on a wide portfolio of projects, from consumer goods to high-tech products, working for international clients in the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea. Major clients included Applied Materials, Zebra and Qualcast, a lawn mower manufacturer. The management and production structure at RWG, typical of firms at the time, comprised three different groups working together: product design, interior design and a workshop. Jony was assigned to the product team.

His coworkers comprised twenty designers, engineers and graphic designers working in an open studio. Jony and his colleagues had quick access to a workshop, which was directly below. It was a fully equipped model-making facility, with five on-staff model makers. The interior design team had twenty-three designers, architects and computer specialists.
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RWG took on two basic types of product design projects, according to partner Barrie Weaver. One was a full design and development process, typically for clients in the United Kingdom. Such projects involved developing the product concept, producing finished working models, undertaking much of the engineering development and overseeing tooling—in short, taking the project through to production. The second kind of project was more limited, focusing on the generation of new ideas or products, usually for foreign clients, most of them in Japan and Korea. In most such cases, the client company had its own in-house design team but was looking for fresh concepts or a different approach from the outside.

“It is important to understand that our projects were done on very
tight time frames and fees,” Weaver said of this time at RWG. “If we did not undertake the project efficiently then the business would lose money. This therefore makes decision making prompt and restricts time to be spent on analysis, research, ethnography, societal opportunities, etc.”

In his new workplace, Jony was as productive as he had been at Newcastle. “Some designers believe the more research you do, the better the solution,” said Weaver. “I personally believe in common sense and intuition. Jonathan’s strength was that he quickly grasped the essentials of a challenge, producing intuitive solutions, which were elegant, viable and had a sense of detail rare in one so young.”

He gained the confidence of his coworkers as an enthusiastic, hardworking team player. “He was a quiet character, with a lovely sense of humor,” Gray recalled. “He was not by any means a loud person in the studio. He was very productive and got on with his tasks. He worked incredibly hard and was very diligent. His productivity was amazing, with consummate quality. He really was prolific. He often would produce half a dozen great ideas in a very short space of time and was not only able to talk about them but could articulate them through some very good draftsmanship.”
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While Jony’s style seemed to suit RWG, the nature of doing business as a consultancy didn’t. As an outside firm, RWG often had to make concessions to its clients, something that would soon begin to drive Jony crazy. “It is important to understand that there are other aspects which come into play when you are a consultant,” Weaver explained. “The client has the final say—they are paying!”

On the other hand, Weaver clearly understood his designer’s frustration. “Sadly, clients’ marketing teams often have what I would call dubious taste and force changes upon the design. In consequence you end up with some projects of which you are proud and others which are a compromise.”

As part of the design pool, Jony collaborated with the other designers. He worked on outdoor garden lighting and lawn mowers for the UK manufacturer Qualcast. He created several conceptual designs for industrial power drills for another British company, Kango.

His confidence grew rapidly and, after just a few weeks at RWG, he asked Gray for a substantial raise: He was talented and felt he deserved it. But he was also young, just out of school, and Gray had to coach the young upstart on the reality of raises.

“I had to balance the interests of the business,” said Gray. “I had to have a very difficult discussion. I had to explain he was on a journey, on a career path. There were others around. Everyone had various strengths and weaknesses. We had to balance the books in terms of making sure everyone got a fair opportunity. That fell upon me to do that. It wasn’t a pleasant experience because one doesn’t like to disappoint people. But we had a rational discussion. He went away. I think he felt he didn’t get the best end of the deal. On the other hand, he didn’t sulk. He just carried on.”

His talents, however, presented other challenges to his managers at RWG. In 1989, Jony’s classroom hearing aid project had been featured in the high-profile Young Designers Exhibition, run by the UK Design Council. The futuristic work came to the attention of an executive at Ideal Standard, a giant in bathroom and toilet fixtures in the United Kingdom. The sales director at Ideal Standard was so impressed with Jony’s work that he approached Roberts Weaver and asked that Jony be assigned to work on a particular design project for the company. Roberts Weaver felt obliged to decline the request.
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“We had a studio of twelve designers and there was no way we could send a fresh graduate such as Jony to go and work with one of our clients,” said Gray. “So we responded to Ideal Standard that they could give us a design brief, which we would fulfill, but it was our decision as
to which of our designers we would assign to do the work. When he heard this, he walked away! He specifically wanted Jony to do the project.”

In time, the Ideal Standard executive would reemerge on Jony’s horizon. But in 1989, the savings and loan banking crisis took a toll on RWG’s business. The company’s interior design group had been getting numerous commissions to design dealing rooms for banks in the United Kingdom, Spain and Australia. But as the financial crisis spread around the world, the banks canceled. “With the financial crisis, banks terminated projects leaving our designers without work,” recalled Weaver. “At the same time, the lack of credit meant UK manufacturers pulled back on their new product development programs.”
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RWG had to close down the interior design operation in London. Weaver’s business partner, Jos Roberts, left, moving to Australia, and the product design team was restructured. As part of the restructuring, Weaver drew up new contracts for all the designers.

None of the designers would sign the new contract—except Jony. And he only signed it because the new contract invalidated his old contract, which had married him to RWG because they had sponsored him through college. As a result of the freshly opened legal loophole, his obligation ended. He quit RWG, the first phase of his professional life at an end.

Jony went to see his friend Clive Grinyer. Together with another London designer, Martin Darbyshire, Grinyer had cofounded Tangerine Design a year earlier.

The partners were old friends. Grinyer and Darbyshire had met as students at Central Saint Martins in London, and subsequently worked
together at the London studio of Bill Moggridge Associates. Grinyer had left to join RWG, where he met Jony, then took a job at Science Park in Cambridge, the UK’s version of Silicon Valley. While working in Science Park, Grinyer was approached by the Commtel phone company to design some new phones. Commtel wanted him as a salaried employee, but Grinyer persuaded them to let him take the job as a freelancer. With the £20,000 from Commtel, he set up shop with Darbyshire.

“When I had the opportunity to start up a design consultancy, I asked Martin to go for a curry”—that is, they went out to an Indian restaurant—“and he immediately decided that he wanted to join me. We seem to be glued together through life!”
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They set up shop in a front bedroom of Darbyshire’s middle-class home in Finsbury Park, in north London. Grinyer bought office supplies, including a Macintosh and a laser printer, with the money from Commtel.
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Initially they called themselves Landmark, after the Landmark Trust rental houses Darbyshire liked to stay in during his family vacations. They thought the name sounded properly grand, but they were promptly and aggressively sued by a Dutch company already using the name. “We tried to get them to give us a load of money to rebrand, which they didn’t do,” said Grinyer ruefully. After both sides walked away, the lawsuit died and the partners brainstormed a new name. After agreeing on the name Orange they found it, too, was already claimed, in this case by a group of designers in Denmark.

It was Christmastime, and someone saw tangerines lying around. The name was abstract enough to mean lots of things, which the designers wanted. It also reminded them of Tangerine Dream, an early experimental electronic group that Grinyer liked.

“Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened because Tangerine is a much better name,” said Darbyshire. “It was easy
to remember, was understandable in major European languages, and the color was a positive symbol in Asia, a key target market.”
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In the eighties, design partnerships like Tangerine were uncommon; freelance designers tended to set up shop alone. “In the late eighties, design graduates would have gone into what is known as an ‘industry of one,’” explained Professor Alex Milton. “It was an industry of designer–makers, or design art.” But Grinyer harbored larger ambitions.

“A partnership felt more like a real business,” said Grinyer. “And Martin and I were always interestingly dissimilar—and complementary.”

Based in Darbyshire’s house, Grinyer continued to work the contacts he had made working in Cambridge. They designed television accessories and hi-fi components and, thanks to some earlier work, were invited to Detroit to give a talk about in-car entertainment.

“I was also writing articles for design magazines,” said Grinyer. “Our reputation was building.”

Grinyer and Darbyshire made ballsy decisions about promoting themselves. They cleverly made themselves look bigger than they were: As well as writing for design magazines, they took out ads in the same magazines touting their work. The ads got attention, conveying a sense that Tangerine was winning big contracts.

Grinyer and Darbyshire also started teaching at Saint Martins one or two days per week, which helped spread the name of their fledgling company (they taught several designers who went on to become famous, including Sam Hecht and Oliver King). They produced promotional brochures, too, in which they described their work as “products for people.”
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They described Tangerine’s focus as being on end users, who tended to be ignored by other design firms. “No one was speaking about end users,” said Darbyshire. “It was all about ‘how to deliver things reliably,’
not about ‘what should it or could it be?’ This was the fundamental thing behind Tangerine that I believe we all bought into and worked hard to develop.”

The combined marketing strategies worked. “My aim was for us to be among the three most naturally sought-after consultancies to provide advice on product design, along with IDEO and Seymourpowell,” said Grinyer. By 1990, they had enough steady work to move out of Darbyshire’s front bedroom to a real office in Hoxton, in the East End of London, in a converted warehouse. It was just half of one floor, rented to them by a female architect they knew; the timing was right. “My wife was also about to give birth to our first son, so we needed our big bedroom back,” said Darbyshire.

The studio was a classic postindustrial loft, comprising a big, long room, with raw plaster walls and rough wooden floors. The designers set the decorating tone with some Philippe Starck chairs and IKEA desks and shelves. The Hoxton neighborhood today is a trendy area of central London, but two decades ago, tougher times had left a lot of abandoned and derelict light-industrial buildings. Hoxton was also home to lunchtime strip clubs—more like strip pubs, this being London—that catered to workers in The City, London’s nearby financial district. Grinyer’s car was broken into all the time; his radio got swiped, his tires cut.
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The London Apprentice pub at the end of Hoxton Street near the studio was a big gay pub in the area, which regularly had ABBA nights that attracted a lot of guests in silver jumpsuits. It was a lively neighborhood.

Jony arrived at Tangerine as a third partner just after Tangerine moved to Hoxton—although he was twenty-three and barely out of design college, Grinyer knew “there was no question of Jony being a junior.” Jony and his wife, Heather, bought a small flat not far away in Blackheath, southeast London.

When Jony joined Tangerine, Grinyer and Darbyshire were happy
not just to get his immense design talent but a big client: Jony brought with him Ideal Standard, the UK giant in toilets and bathroom fixtures that asked for him personally back at RWG. But at Tangerine, Jony worked on everything, from power tools to combs, and televisions to toilets. At Tangerine, the designers worked on everything collaboratively.

The work was consistent but not especially challenging or prestigious. Tangerine occasionally got commissions from big corporations like Hitachi or Ford, but most of the work was on small projects for random, obscure businesses. “It was a very competitive time for design firms,” explained Northumbria’s Professor Rodgers. “Companies tended not to specialize. They did everything. They worked on many things—packaging for shampoo, a new motorcycle, the interior of a train. They had to work on everything.”
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Many of the smaller firms had very finite budgets and little or no experience in working with design consultants. Typically, they expected to spend just a few thousand pounds while Tangerine, still building its business, needed to bill much larger amounts. Often Tangerine’s proposals ran into the tens of thousands of pounds, way above their prospective clients’ budgets. As a result they wouldn’t get the work.

The partners had little choice but to take the rejections philosophically. “Most work in the UK at that time was heavily about engineering, rather than user research or concept design work, so we were ahead of the market a bit,” said Darbyshire. “We had, on one hand, to flex and work with smaller companies designing smaller products all the way to manufacture, at the same time as trying to win business from the Asia and the U.S., and grow.”

To attract and keep clients, the Tangerine designers worked to make the studio look busier than it was. They remembered a trick that RWG had used: When executives from a car company came to visit, the firm’s designers drove their own cars into the studio and put sheets over them,
saying they were for a secret project.
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The trick worked and RWG had gotten the job. Taking RWG’s cue, if a client came to visit their offices in Hoxton, Jony and his Tangerine partners made sure the studio was stacked with all the prototypes and foam models they’d created on earlier projects. When the client left, the models would be put back in storage.
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Jony, Grinyer, and Darbyshire designed power tools for Bosche and electronic equipment for Goldstar. The three designers gave their full attention to a simple barber’s comb for Brian Drumm, a hairdresser in Scotland. Jony’s concept contained a spirit level in the handle so that the barber could hold it in the right position while clipping his clients’ locks. It’s still sold for cutting single-length bobs and other precision haircuts. The job had a small budget, but, characteristically, the designers gave it their full attention. “Brian Drumm chose Jon’s beautiful concept for the hair-cutting comb, but I worked painstakingly to translate it into an engineering design for production,” said Darbyshire. It was ultimately worth it: The comb went on to win an award from the highly prestigious German Industrie Forum in 1991, burnishing the firm’s reputation.

The Hoxton neighborhood suited Tangerine. Jony and Grinyer joined a local gym (Jony to this day does a lot of gym training). “This was old Hoxton, not what Hoxton is now,” said Grinyer. “So in the gym there were guys boxing while Jony and I were trying to get fit on running machines and lifting weights.” Jony’s old friend from college, Tonge, worked just around the corner and visited often. He remembered the area as “very similar to San Francisco’s modern South Park neighborhood, near some tough areas but generally full of high-end professionals and a thriving work and art scene. There were also lots of hardware stores and raw-material suppliers, which made it easier to mine for the young designers in the area,” including Ross Lovegrove and Julian Brown.
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“The late eighties was a good vintage. ID was not yet fashionable so a
lot of people were doing it for the right reasons—to make good design, not become stars.”

A year after Jony joined Tangerine, the three principals were joined by a fourth team member, Peter Phillips. The men shared an interlinking work experience: A 1982 graduate of Central Saint Martins College with a BA in ID, Phillips met Grinyer at Central, knew Darbyshire when they both worked at IDEO, and had encountered Jony at RWG.

“When I first met [Jony], he was just starting,” said Phillips. “My impression of him was that he was a really nice bloke, just one of these delightful gentlemen. He is what he looks like. He does have this very quiet demeanor about him. Very generous, but he wasn’t very serious, always had the ability to just laugh about things. But he was bloody good at what he did.”
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Like Jony, Phillips brought some clients with him, including two electronics giants, Hitachi and LG Electronics. In the middle of the recession, LG especially was a huge win. The Korean giant had set up its first Euro design center in Dublin, Ireland, and wanted a European design firm. “We got into LG early on and all were very enthusiastic,” said Phillips. “It was fantastic and allowed us to design some great stuff.”

The four designers were equal business partners in the venture. There were disagreements along the way, mostly between old friends Grinyer and Darbyshire, but they got through them. “Sometimes it came down to who could shout loudest but we always came to an amicable arrangement,” said Phillips. “It was something we’d brush under the carpet after a few minutes. Jony and I were the diplomats of the group, we used to say.” The young business also had to be careful with its finances. “We were sensible people so we never really pushed the finances too much,” said Phillips. “If we had a small overdraft or didn’t have enough money at the end of each month to pay ourselves, we would take less and do it sensibly.”

The Tangerine crew in those days still made lots of detailed sketches
and models. Many were made in Jony’s parents’ garage because of the mess, but others were farmed out. “We had a good model maker that was a stone’s throw from the studio who made sure the models were good and beautiful,” said Phillips. “Most of UK model making has gone bust now but they were great at the time. They’d be craft-based, and we’d go down there and discuss details.”

Technology was becoming a part of the design process, but slowly. One Mac sat in the middle of the room, and, as Phillips reported, “We took turns to use it.” Tangerine was typical in this, as computer-aided design (CAD) hadn’t yet become essential to most designers’ tool kits.