With LoveFrom Jony Ive: The end of an era

Sir Jony Ive is no ordinary Apple employee.

His contribution to the world of industrial design is virtually unmatched. He began working in London with Tangerine Designs in 1990. At the time, Apple outsourced its designs to this external agency, and Ive was assigned to Apple’s Project Juggernaut. His work on designing Powerbooks, and the line of luxury Macintosh laptops (before they transitioned to Intel-powered MacBooks) was feted by Apple. And thus was a forged an inseparable working relationship that lasted nearly three decades.

Last week, Apple announced Ive’s departure from their firm to start a design firm of his own, LoveFrom. However, with this news, several critics have been calling it the end of Apple’s domination of modern, design-first tech products. Apple is said to have brought in LoveFrom as an independent contractor to continue Ive’s vision for the company. But, there’s a strong case to be made that news of Ive’s quitting could affect Apple stocks up to 10% (which translates to just over $7 billion, as per the company’s latest valuation).

Ive’s role in creating the Apple brand

Jony Ive was Steve Job’s secret elf in the Apple workshops that led to the company’s unprecedented revival in 1996. Founder/CEO Steve Jobs himself had a keen eye for design, and believed in relentless attention to detail and functional design for longevity of any product- a philosophy that changed Apple from a luxury brand to a beacon for everyday innovation and simplicity. Jony Ive and Steve Jobs shared a mutual love for functional design, and often the design first philosophy created products that went beyond merely functional, to groundbreaking at the time. While Ive created his notoriously unfixable and unrepairable designs to give Apple its first profits after the launch of the iMac in 1998, Jobs gave him ample space and resources to innovate on a number of iconic Apple products, including the iPod, MacBook and iPad, all of which were revolutions in terms of design, innovation and quality of electronics.

Since 1996, Ive led the Apple design teams to create revolution after revolution.

Ive has 5000 patents in industrial design as a result of his uncanny insight and thoughtful design thinking process. He’s credited for the multi-touch feature, an intuitive feature that allows you to pinch to zoom out of pictures or scroll through articles like this one with ease. Every touch screen for smartphones adopted it after its introduction to the markets. Similarly, the earliest of Apple PCs introduced colour as a concept for personal electronics, getting rid of the beige and tan plastic aesthetic. Early Apple PCs introduced USB as a standard interface, giving the protocol the launchpad to its ubiquity today. Several other patents highlight Ive’s foresight and Apple’s commitment to ensuring quality execution, under Job’s keen eye for modularity and perfection.

He was elevated to Chief Design Officer in 2015.

A luxury mac

Sometimes Ive’s attention to modern design and aesthetics cost a lot. Apple once released a Mac that retailed at $7500 and was hand delivered to your doorstep by a chauffeur in a limousine. His old employers often criticised his designs for looking too modern and expensive.

He used that same design philosophy for a number of other projects at Apple, aside from his major projects leading teams to build fresh and futuristic designs. He worked on a $300 coffee table book that features his standout designs. He built the Apple Park in California, an imposing megastructure that houses all of Apple in a thoughtfully designed urban sprawl in the heart of Silicon Valley. His understanding and closeness with Steve Jobs meant that they would both work carefully to curate every detail, including which arborist was to take care of specific oaks Jobs liked near the Stanford dish.

His passion for Apple is clearly second only to that of design, supported by a strong philosophy at Apple.

Design philosophy and Dieter Rams

Ive has been criticised for deliberately building products with flaws, in order to drive sales in Apple and encouraging and shaping a way of consumerism that has had several adverse effects in driving sales of electronics at the cost of the environment. Many believe that giving consumers faulty phones that must be replaced often has created an unnecessary demand that creates problems with sourcing and disposal of raw materials.

If he feels any guilt for playing into the capitalist ideals, we don’t know thus far, but it’s interesting to note that his inspiration, Dieter Rams felt guilt for shaping consumer markets with his work.

Dieter Rams was the Jony Ive for Braun, a German consumer electronics company. Ive has spoken very sincerely about his fascination by Rams’ products in his childhood, which inspired him to work in industrial design. In this transcript, Ives talks openly about his awe of Braun, his contribution to design without being constrained by technology, and the importance of collaboration to create fastidiously and at scale. Dieter Rams had over 500 innovations to his name, Ive has 5000. Rams and Ive have a stunningly similar design principles, which Rams has appreciated. Apple unfortunately depends on its design as its unique selling point and sued Samsung for $1 billion for appropriating its UI design and filing for a patent in 2012.

Rams came out to the press with horror about a hyper-consumerist culture he helped shape. He believes he built products to last, but people who appropriated his designs often didn’t build products to last and made products that were marketed on good design in a farcical manner.

Ive is certainly responsible for creating designs under pressure of creating value for Apple and their shareholders, which he himself believes is too much responsibility for a creative brain to take while trying to be innovative. His speech, on receiving the Stephen Hawking fellowship last year, gives great insight into his faith to the design process.

Apple in a Post-Ive Era

Several articles in the past few days hypothesise what might change within Apple in a post-Ive era. There have been theories that Apple design has never been the same after Jobs quit and Tim Cook took over, but they might be driven by biased journalism and anti-Cook proponents.

Some journalists have made it clear that nothing is likely to change, but that may be wishful thinking as Apple goes back to the days of commissioning design again. That they are enlisting LoveFrom in the process may be the difference from the 1990s Apple which made several products with low or no turnover in the process.

LoveFrom, Ive’s new venture, is intrinsically run on Steve Jobs’ theories. From Ive’s interview in this Financial Times piece,

“There was an employee meeting a number of years ago and Steve [Jobs] was talking . . . He said

that one of the fundamental motivations was that when you make something with love and with care, even though you probably will never meet . . . the people that you’re making it for, and you’ll never shake their hand, by making something with care, you are expressing your gratitude to humanity, to the species.”

“I so identified with that motivation and was moved by his description. So my new company is called ‘LoveFrom’. It succinctly speaks to why I do what I do.”

LoveFrom is Ive’s new venture with his longtime colleague and now partner Marc Newson famous for designing luxury katanas (samurai swords) for $300,000 and a chair for ~$5 million. What comes from this partnership of different design ideologies will be interesting to watch.

While Apple might change, the principles of refined design still lives and will thrive under a different banner. 

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Suradha Iyer is a writing analyst at Qrius