Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (6 page)

A voracious reader, Jony’s tastes ran to books on design theory, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and nineteenth-century literature.
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A museum-goer, too, he and his dad had made many visits over the years to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one of the world’s leading art and design museums.

He studied the work of Eileen Gray, one of the twentieth century’s most influential furniture designers and architects. Modern masters fascinated Jony, among them Michele De Lucchi, a member of Italy’s Memphis group, who tried to make high-tech objects easy to understand by making them gentle, humane and a bit friendly.
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Grinyer remembered Jony falling in love with furniture maker Jasper Morrison’s school of design, which was very architecturally pure, all straight lines with no curvaceous shapes. He was also fascinated by Dieter Rams, the legendary designer at Braun. “We were all inspired by Dieter Rams,” said Grinyer. “Rams’s design principles were implanted into us at design school—but we were not designing products that looked like Braun’s at Tangerine. Jony just liked the simplicity.”
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All four designers were interested in design philosophy, but Jony especially. Because Grinyer and Darbyshire were teaching, they were interested in trying to articulate what the firm’s design philosophy was. Both Grinyer and Darbyshire had done time with Bill Moggridge at ID Two/IDEO; he was a big influence on their style. One of the key lessons was adopting “no strong ideological viewpoint,” recalled Grinyer. Another key for Moggridge had been collaboration.

“IDEO had a consensus [system] so that everyone had to agree, and so Grinyer and Darbyshire were quite keen that when they did design work that everyone agreed on it. So they had a lot of reviews together about designs going forth, which was very good because it meant that you were testing yourself all the time,” Phillips said, “and that’s a really good way of doing it so that you are trying to please your client and at the same time you’re trying to push yourself, because you begin to feel yourself that this is something quite exciting.”

As for aesthetics, there were influences, but the Tangerine group never clung to a style for its own sake. “It was important for all of us, including Jony, that we were designing things for a reason,” said Grinyer.

“Jony was interested in getting things right and fit for a purpose. He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point for his designs. He had the ability to remove, or ignore, how any product currently is, or how an engineer might say it must be. He could go back to basics on any product design, or user interface design. And we all shared this similar philosophy at Tangerine. It was not so much due to our formal design education, but more a reaction to seeing the ways that other people were designing.”
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For Jony, this represented a shift. At college, his projects had showed the beginnings of a design language, or at least a signature style, as most were in white plastic. But at Tangerine, Jony went out of his way not to put a particular stamp on his work. “Unlike most of his generation, Ive
did not see design as an occasion to exert his ego or carry out some pre-ordained style or theory,” wrote Paul Kunkel, who interviewed Jony in detail for his book,
AppleDesign
, a look at Apple’s design department in the 1980s. “Rather, he approached each project in an almost chameleon-like way, adapting himself to the product (rather than the other way around) . . . For this reason, Ive’s early works have no ‘signature style.’”
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Then, as now, Jony’s aesthetic tended toward minimalism, in reaction perhaps to the mid-1980s tendencies for excess. That had been the height of the “designer decade,” when the splashy colors of Culture Club and Kajagoogoo represented good taste. According to Kunkel, Jony avoided styling his products to protect them from dating too quickly. “In an era of rapid change, Ive understood that style has a corrosive effect on design, making a product seem old before its time. By avoiding style, he found that his designs could not only achieve greater longevity, he could focus instead on the kind of authenticity in his work that all designers aspire to, but rarely achieve.”

Jony was not alone. Grinyer, Darbyshire and Phillips were minimalists, too, as were a growing number of other design firms. There was a global wave of minimalism, adopted by Tangerine and picked up by other designers, among them Naoto Fukasawa in Japan and Sam Hecht, another Saint Martins graduate, who worked on a lot of design for “no-brand, high-quality” Muji, the consumer and household products manufacturer. “In the contemporary culture of the 1980s, there was the cliché of the over-designed environment, where everything was a riot of color and form,” explained Professor Alex Milton. “It was a visual overload. Objects shouted at you.

“[Jony] graduated in this period where there was a lot of over-design. Objects did not impart any of their owner’s personality. They were brands. And so designers wanted to become cooler, calmer, more reflective, and return to a sense of functionalism and utilitarianism.”

Darbyshire expressed Tangerine’s basic thinking this way: “We were trying to make things genuinely better, giving thought to the visual quality, usability and market relevance of all that we designed.”

Grinyer contrasted this approach to the work at other agencies, which tried to put their signature on their commissions. “When I was with Bill Moggridge, I saw lots of really good designers who could only design a particular sort of office-based industrial product,” he said. “When they tried to apply their same aesthetic to more mass-market, everyday products, they really failed. They came up with oddly techno products. And that puzzled me. I thought that design should be able to speak in different languages according to each specific purpose.”

Advances in manufacturing technology allowed Jony and his colleagues to gently push the envelope. “The 1990s were a time when we were beginning to be able to decorate products,” Grinyer said. “Their form could be more interesting. It was no longer just about cladding electronics and putting the button in the right place. We could bring in more shapes, exploit the fluidity offered by injection molding plastics. We could create things that were actually beautiful rather than simply functional.”

Again, this had a potential downside, which Grinyer witnessed firsthand working at IDEO. “Designers would often come up with merely a shape,” he said. “They did not think about the different functionality of, say, a computer screen and a television. I thought that was a mistake. We did not want to make something that was merely a beautiful shape. We wanted our designs to fit into people’s homes. And we were very much focused on the user interface of products.”

For his part, Jony took an independent view: His priority seemed always to be the creation of objects that were beautiful rather than simply functional. He was constantly questioning how things should be. “He hated ugly, black and tacky electronics,” recalled Grinyer. “He hated computers having names like ZX75 and numbers of megabytes.
He hated technology as it was in the 1990s.” At a time of big changes in design, Jony looked to find his own way.

Ideal Standard had been rebuffed when it asked to work directly with Jony at RWG, but Tangerine was only too happy to oblige the company. Early in Jony’s time at Tangerine, Ideal Standard commissioned a new line of bathroom appliances, including a toilet, bidet and sink, to replace the company’s long-running Michelangelo line.

With characteristic thoroughness, Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire applied themselves to the new bathroom suite. But the work, which had seemed like a lifesaver for the young company, soon turned into a nightmare. Looking back on it, the episode probably planted the seeds of Jony’s eventual departure.

As he threw himself into the work for Ideal Standard, Jony bought marine biology books for inspiration and scoured them for influences from nature. “Jony was very fascinated with water, and he looked a lot at water flow,” recalled Grinyer. “He took his inspiration for the bowl he designed as almost a Greek religious artifact.

“He talked about the worshipping of water. That water was going to become a scarce resource. That water was something that must be honored. So he made an elliptical bowl, with an incredible architectural pillar. It was beautifully radical.”
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Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire presented Ideal Standard with three collections, each named after Ninja Turtles that, in turn, had gotten their names from the Renaissance artists Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo.
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They went to Jony’s parents’ garage—the senior Ives by then had moved to rural Somerset—and produced handmade foam models of sinks and toilets. They were “stunningly good,” said Grinyer.

The three designers drove to Ideal Standard’s headquarters in Hull to pitch the company on the new designs. They set up in a large room so that a product manager could eyeball the models to see if they were fit for presentation. When they were ushered into a meeting with the CEO and a couple of other executives, however, they failed to impress.

The CEO rejected the designs outright in a torrent of criticism. They were too expensive to produce, he said, and they didn’t fit into the established design line. The executive worried that the sink’s architectural pillar, which Jony had been very proud of, might fall over and crush children.

“The presentation was hard work,” remembered Grinyer. “Our ideas for the designs fell flat. . . . The problem was that our designs were very different to Ideal Standard’s usual range of products.”

To make matters worse, the CEO was wearing a red clown’s nose made of foam. It was the UK’s Comic Relief Day, a nationwide fund-raiser where everyone wears red clown noses to raise money for charity. The rejection seemed like a bad joke indeed.

Grinyer said Jony drove back to London dispirited. “He was dejected and depressed,” recalled Grinyer. “He had poured himself into working for people who really didn’t care.”
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Darbyshire remembered that day too. “Jony was unhappy that they hadn’t completely loved his designs.”

Jony’s good humor usually allowed him to laugh off such setbacks, but the crashing failure at Ideal Standard wasn’t so easy to forget. Even though the dejected Jony would continue the development of the design, the process felt wrong to him. According to Darbyshire, “The problem was that they wanted to ‘productionize it’ and, in so doing, tore out its heart and soul.”

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Despite the initial failure with Ideal Standard, Tangerine was beginning to work with more and more big clients. The team, according to Grinyer,
felt as if they were on a “rollercoaster.” They continued to cleverly publicize themselves. “We did a lot of speculative pieces whereby I came up with some concepts and Jony did amazing design works, which we could then push out to the press, get them beautifully photographed and create a buzz,” said Grinyer. “Within just five years, we went from a small company operating out of a back room of a house in London to having big international customers.”

Jony didn’t enjoy the fact that part of his job involved selling the firm. “At Tangerine, it was always very important that the four partners were the creatives,” Grinyer explained. “We were perhaps proud of ourselves and we wanted to carry on designing rather than be figureheads who took on commissions and passed them on to behind-the-scenes employees to do the work. However, despite this, as an agency we were spending up to ninety percent of our time selling our services. Jony was younger than we were, and wanted to devote all his time to designing great stuff. He could sometimes feel frustrated.”

Jony gradually realized that he wasn’t cut out for consulting. He loved to design, but found the concessions necessary to build the business difficult, resisting the reality that, in small partnerships, every designer should also be a salesperson.

“I was pretty naïve,” Jony said later. “I hadn’t been out of college for long but I learnt lots by designing a range of different objects: from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. Importantly, I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, nor good at, building a business.”
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It particularly upset him when his work got ruined by the people he was working for. His old boss at RWG, Phil Gray, spoke to Jony in 2012: “Jony told me that the reason he was so frustrated in consultancy was because he was not able to see projects through to completion,” reported Gray. “Clients
would select bits of what he had produced and then instruct him how to put together those bits according to their own ideas. He was not able to execute what he had in mind for any project. He was so far ahead of his time, that clients often just did not get what he was doing.”
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Grinyer had also seen Jony’s frustration with the clients. “Frequently he would make a beautiful design, which when engineered would look only half as good as it should have done.”

Bob Brunner, whom Jony had met on his California trip several years earlier, paid a visit to Tangerine’s studio on Hoxton Street in fall 1991. Having left Lunar Design three years before, Brunner had settled in at Apple, and was now the head of ID. He’d built a killer team of hotshot designers (including several who would later play important roles in developing the iPod, iPhone and iPad).

Brunner was scouting Europe for outside design firms to work with Apple on a secret project called Project Juggernaut. Even though it was officially taboo for a big company like Apple to use outside commissions to recruit talent, Brunner later admitted that was one of his goals.

“I was trying to get Jony,” he admitted. “I wanted to get him to work on the project, and I thought it was another way to get him involved with the company.”
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In 1991, Apple was still riding high. The company had grown from a tiny start-up in Steve Jobs’s garage to one of the largest companies in the fast-growing PC industry. Steve Jobs was no longer at Apple, having quit six years earlier, and was now trying very hard to make his new company, NeXT, a success. His other company, Pixar, was also struggling although, four years later, it released its first film,
Toy Story
, which became a blockbuster.

Apple was being run by John Sculley, a former PepsiCo executive whom Steve Jobs had lured to the company with the immortal line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
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Sculley’s reputation is mixed these days, but at the time, he hadn’t yet put a wrong foot forward. Apple was huge, and the computer industry was exploding. The desktop publishing revolution was putting Macs in businesses all over the world. The company had just celebrated its first ever two-billion-dollar revenue quarter.
MacAddict
magazine proclaimed the era was “the first golden age of Macintosh.” Windows 1995 was still a few years in the future; no one could yet know that Microsoft’s operating system would entirely reshape the PC industry—and almost put Apple out of business.

Flush with cash, Apple was expanding its product lines. Sculley was investing Apple’s horde of $2.1 billion in cash in R&D to speed up development of new products. He got a lot of attention for talking up a new line of innovative hyper-portable computers he called “personal digital assistants,” a term he coined at a major speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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Although it would be a couple of years before Sculley’s PDA would actually hit the market as the Newton MessagePad, the IDg was hard at work on it.

Brunner’s design team was busy not only with the MessagePad but also a new line of PowerBooks. Although the first PowerBook hadn’t yet been released, Brunner’s design team was working on the second generation. The PowerBook was a revolution: the first “real” laptop in the fledgling PC industry, which had concentrated on desktop machines. However, the first PowerBook was big and heavy: It was more like a battery-powered desktop than a true portable computer and, for the design team, it’d been a nightmare. Brunner and his team had had to simultaneously invent, engineer, design and test the machine under a tight deadline.

Faced with the work of the next generation of products, Brunner was worried that the team was concentrating too much on the here and now, and not spending enough time looking at what might be coming up in the future. It was obvious that mobile was a new frontier, and Brunner wanted to see where it might go.

“As product schedules get tighter and the level of difficulty rises, the first casualty is innovation,” Brunner said. “I wanted to see design that was leaning forward . . . design that would predict what was coming rather than reflect what we already know and see.”
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Attempting to keep the spirit of innovation alive, Brunner had started conducting offline projects—what he called “parallel design investigations.”

“The idea was to develop new form factors, new levels of expression and strategies for handling new technology without the pressure of a deadline,” he explained. Critically, Brunner wanted to keep this type of investigation “off-line” because it allowed his team to make mistakes, to feel separate enough from the grind of production that the creative juices could percolate. “Because the ideas generated off-line are often our best ideas, parallel design investigations can be extremely valuable,” he said. “This information not only enriches our language, it gives you something to point to and say ‘this is what we can move towards.’”
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That was a factor in his European trip: Brunner especially liked working with outside consultants (after all, he’d been one himself with Lunar Design before moving to Apple). “I decided to hire people from the consulting world so that IDg could function like a consultancy working with the speed and agility of an independent design firm,” he said. “In my experience, consultants want to build their portfolio and will compete to do the most interesting work. So I centered my search on the best local consultants and talented people, fresh out of school.” This description fitted Jony and Tangerine to a tee. Jony was only three
years out of Newcastle and had impressed Brunner with his concept phone.

As soon as he walked into the Hoxton studio, Brunner was excited by what he saw. He first laid eyes on a soda-making machine created by Grinyer for SodaStream, a British company. It had a swing door that opened and closed with a clever latch—the kind of hinge that, Brunner thought, might be adapted to the screen on a portable product. Brunner raved about it: “This is exactly the kind of creative thinking we’re looking for.”
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Brunner had something of his own to show the four London designers. He pulled a prototype PowerBook out of his bag. Phillips was impressed. “I had never seen that and it was incredible,” he said. Indeed, with its offset keyboard, centralized pointing device, and forward palm rests, the first PowerBook would set the standard for basic laptop design for the next twenty years, a fact that still surprises everyone. “We hit a homerun with the PowerBook,” Brunner said. “It surprised me to death. There were so many flaws with that machine and that design. I thought it was going to be a huge failure. But looking back today, basically all laptops are that design—a recessed keyboard, palm rests, a central pointing device.”

Before Brunner’s design, laptops had keyboards that were all the way forward and they didn’t have pointing devices. Most ran Microsoft’s MS-DOS, which relied on a command-line interface, rather than a graphical one like the Mac, and so used four-way cursor keys. There was no need for a pointing device and, as Windows took hold, manufacturers started using clip-on trackballs.

“It’s interesting, in retrospect, that from the PowerBook to today’s MacBook, it turned out to be almost the perfect design,” Brunner said. “No one’s been able to improve on it. . . . [W]e didn’t realize we already had something that was very difficult to move beyond.”

Over the course of a few London meetings, Brunner and Tangerine exchanged ideas. Jony created a prototype mouse as a sort of test. The conversations went well and, as a result, Tangerine was given a contract to consult on Juggernaut.

Jony was both excited and scared. The Apple job was a huge break for Tangerine and, he realized, for him personally too. He later recalled, “I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and my being so nervous that I would mess it all up.”
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As Brunner explained, Project Juggernaut was a wide-ranging parallel product investigation. The idea was to explore a suite of mobile products even further off in the future. Brunner and his team felt confident that the new PowerBook and Newton portable would kick off a whole range of mobile products. They began imagining noncomputer products, including digital cameras, personal audio players, small PDAs and bigger pen-based tablets. (These might sound familiar but fulfillment of these dreams wouldn’t come for at least another decade—and under the leadership of an entirely new regime.)

They hoped that pen-based digital assistants, digital cameras and laptop computers could be linked together using infrared, radio wave and cellular networks. Brunner wanted the design group to have several mobile products ready in case Apple’s upper management suddenly decided the company needed to start making them.

Brunner had approached a couple of other outside design firms in addition to Tangerine, and he had some of Apple’s in-house designers working on concepts. “We knew certain things were coming,” explained Brunner. “We knew wireless was going to be important, and that image capture was going to be more important. Things were going to get smaller. Batteries were going to get better.”
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While an Apple team in California worked on several concepts for portable products, the team at Tangerine designed four speculative
products: a tablet, a tablet keyboard, and a pair of “transportable” desktop computers. Brunner wanted the products to be convertible; the tablet should convert into a laptop and vice versa. “For some reason, ironically, we thought convertibility would be really important,” explained Brunner. “So you could go from a traditional keyboard and mouse mode to a pen-based mode, which is a little bit of a rage today with some subnotebooks.”
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Brunner noted that these ideas, which seemed a bit strange and radical in the early nineties, weren’t a million miles from the latest tablets and hybrid laptop/tablets for sale today.

Brunner asked Jony and his Tangerine colleagues to push the boundary of the design but to keep the main elements of Apple’s then-current design language (mostly dark gray plastic with some soft bulges). The designs had to be based on real technology so they could conceivably be real products in the near future.

Jony, together with help from Grinyer and Darbyshire, worked on a tablet called the Macintosh Folio. It was a chunky, notebook-sized tablet with a pen-based screen and a huge built-in stand. Made of Apple’s then-usual dark gray plastic, it could almost be a predecessor to the iPad, despite being about five times thicker.

Jony worked alone on a special smart keyboard for the tablet called the Folio keyboard. But unlike today’s detachable keyboards for modern tablets, the Folio keyboard was conceived as an “intelligent keyboard” because it featured its own CPU, network jacks and a trackpad. In effect it was half a laptop, namely, the keyboard half.

Grinyer and Darbyshire worked on a pair of “transportable” desktops that were half desktop, half laptop. These were transformer-like computers, convertible machines with built-in keyboards and screens that could transform from a desktop into a portable and back again.

One was the SketchPad. Made of light gray plastic, it featured an articulated screen that could be adjusted for height and tilt. It could be
folded up into a purse-shaped bundle with a carrying handle for easy transport. (Jony would later revive the idea of a built-in carrying handle with the first iBook.)

The second transportable desktop was called the Macintosh Workspace. It had a built-in, pen-sensitive screen, along with a split keyboard that folded underneath and to the sides when not in use. The Workspace could be folded flat—like a big fat tablet—for transporting, but spread its keyboard like a pair of chunky wings when opened for use.

“I remember one day seeing Jony with this foam model of the tablet on his desk,” said Phillips. “He was sitting away from it with his knees up, typing away on this foam keyboard, and saying ‘this feels good.’”
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“Jon’s was the most thought provoking and, as ever, beautifully detailed,” recalled Darbyshire of the Folio. “He sweated and sweated to get it right and he did just that. It was stunning.”
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With remarkable speed, Jony and the other designers on Project Juggernaut had developed about twenty-five models. In a matter of weeks, they presented the work to Brunner and his team and, over the next few months, the concepts were refined to four principal designs.
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As the project neared completion, Jony’s fears about messing it up almost came true. The fledgling company didn’t have its own model shop for making final prototypes, as such shops require special skills, tools and personnel, typically beyond the means of all but the biggest design studios. (Today, even a company as big as Apple uses external shops for finished models.) So the four Tangerine designers took their Juggernaut mock-ups to a local model maker who had done a lot of work with the film and advertising industry.

The model maker was very talented and his models looked “fantastic,” said Grinyer. They were perfect for showing off their ideas to clients. However, the models weren’t made to last. “When we got the models back, they looked fantastic but would break after you had used
them once,” said Grinyer. “Apple had this pile of broken models they couldn’t do anything with. That was all a bit of a disaster.”
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Despite the rickety models, Brunner was mightily impressed with Jony’s contributions.

“Jony did a really, really sweet tablet,” said Brunner. “Really amazing. True to form with Jony, it was very clean, very sophisticated, super attention to detail. But still it had provocative qualities. . . . It was very developed, refined, sophisticated surfaces that were clean and beautiful but they still felt emotional. They weren’t dull and boring.”
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Brunner remembered that Jony’s Juggernaut designs stood out because they weren’t based on anything that Apple—or any other computer company—had done before. They were utterly original. “They had an emotional maturity that’s rare for someone Jonathan’s age,” Brunner added.
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Jony was twenty-six at the time.

After six months of work on Project Juggernaut, Jony, Grinyer and Darbyshire were flown to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to make a final presentation. Since Phillips hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day work on Juggernaut—he’d been keeping the company afloat working for LG—he stayed behind.