For years, the family’s Palo Alto home was underfurnished; Jobs tore photographs of things he liked out of magazines or books, but didn’t buy them. He often complained—“You don’t want to know,” Powell Jobs said—about one or other switch ruining the experience of his Mercedes. He craved products that didn’t force adjustments of behavior, that gave what Powell Jobs called a “feeling of gratitude that someone else actually thought this through in a way that makes your life easier.” She added, “That’s what Steve was always looking for, and he didn’t find it until he worked with Jony. . . . They were really happy, they relished each other.”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
...to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his contribution. “It was just a conversation,” he said, then explained that, although he’d said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for unevenness: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
Here it is:
Apparently Ive had nothing to do with the controversial cross-guard, though that plays into the whole analogness of this version since it resembles Medieval swordsmithmanship (swordsmithery?!).
We were in Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be. The hood barely sloped, and it met the car’s front end at a tightly curved corner that mirrored the iPhone 6 in Ive’s left hand. We were in the back seat: Ive has reluctantly accepted the services of a driver. Ive said to him, “It’s just over a year, isn’t it, Jean?”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
...ood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are exhibited and raced in the South of England. “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.)
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
It’s true:
For comparison, here’s Ive’s Bentley Mulsanne:
...ly and infantile. Apple has made missteps, but the company’s great design secret may be avoiding insult. Antonelli, of MoMA, described Apple’s design thoughtfulness as “a sign of respect,” and added, “Elegance in objects is everybody’s right, and it shouldn’t cost more than ugliness.”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
... relegated to a lower-rung menu. But others may have had the thought, or the half-thought, that the sounds made the phones more coherent—a more natural accompaniment to glass, aluminum, and Helvetica Neue.
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
The system font for OS X 10.10. From the “OS X Human Interface Guidelines:
The system font is a specially optimized version of Helvetica Neue, which displays textual content with beauty, clarity, and sharpness.
...d, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
9 years
Team members work twelve hours a day and can’t discuss work with friends. Each project has a lead designer, but almost everyone contributes to every project, and shares the credit. (Who had this or that idea? “The team.”) Ive describes his role as lying between two extremes of design leadership: he is not the source of all creativity, nor does he merely assess the proposals of colleagues. The big ideas are often his, a...
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
9 years
...er be conscious of, but that was necessary to do something that was new.” It was a tic that I came to recognize: self-promotion driven by fear that one’s self-effacement might be taken too literally. Even as Apple objects strive for effortlessness, there’s clearly a hope that the effort required—the “huge degree of care,” the years of investigations into new materials, the months spent enforcing cutting paths in Asian factories—will be acknowledged.
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
9 years
...e to see that, like Leonardo da Vinci, he sometimes uses brown ink. There was a little drawing of something that may have been a latch and, in tall, skinny script, the words “pretension” and “smart.” On another page—Apple’s competitors may do with this what they like—Ive seemed to have written the word “Airbug.”
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker
9 years
Fun guessing game here: Hmmm…I’m going to say it’s a thermostat, Apple’s attempt to compete with the elegantly designed Nest:
9 years
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