Posted on Monday 5 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Yes, I’m thankfully taking any chance to post something about our all design hero Jonathan Ive as those chances are pretty rare. This one isn’t an interview, but it lays out a lot of facts you may not know about Apple’s design guru. An excerpt:
With the lack of information, a mythology has grown up around Ive. People want him to be a gadget-obsessed super-nerd or a playboy Brit living it large in Silicon Valley, the “Beckham of design”. Thankfully, he fails on both counts. He lives in a pretty but small house in San Francisco with his wife Heather – an historian and writer – and their 18-month-old twin boys. He wasn’t great on computers at college, and tries to keep his life as clutter-free as possible because he spends enough of his time thinking about stuff already.
What drives him, I think, is not money or fame but an obsession with excellence. He shows me the latest Apple professional computer, in a case made of one piece of aluminium with a hole punched to create handles. There is no plastic cladding, no extra pieces welded on, no visible screws or fixings. “It’s just a really honest piece of beautiful aluminium,” he says lovingly.
With the new Intel Macs around the corner, we’ll most likely see an other one of his creations pretty soon and I’m already sure, we will love it like anything else he did, you just don’t lose such a talent from one day to an other.
