| Biography | Sir Jonathan Paul "Jony" Ive, KBE, HonFREng, RDI is a British industrial, product and architectural designer who is the former Chief Design Officer (CDO) of Apple Inc., and the serving Chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London. He joined Apple in September 1992, where he remained until his announced departure in July 2019. Following several years of designing Apple products, he was promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in the late 1990s after the return of co-founder Steve Jobs to the company, and CDO in 2015. Working closely with Jobs during their tenure together at Apple, Ive designed the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and parts of the user interface of Apple's mobile operating system iOS. He also helped design Apple's major architectural projects, such as Apple Park and Apple Stores.
Born in London, England, he lived there until his family moved to Stafford at the age of 12. Ive studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (later renamed University of Northumbria at Newcastle), during which time he had his work displayed at the Design Museum. After graduating from Newcastle, Ive was hired by the London-based start-up design firm Tangerine to work in their industrials group. Ive began working at Apple in the early 1990s, designing the decade's PowerBooks and Macs. He was invited to join the Royal College of Art in May 2017 as its head-of-college, serving a fixed five-year term until May 2022.
His body of workfrom his university years to presenthas been influenced by the Bauhaus design tradition, in particular its focus on the credos "form follows function" and "less is more". German designer Dieter Rams has cited Ive's work as in-line with his ten principles of good design. Parallels in color stencil, structure, and lighting design can be found with the luxury German automotive, Audi. Ive frequently lent his voicenoted for its Essex accent and reserved, quiet style of speechto Apple's marketing and promotional videos.
Ive has received a number of accolades and honours for his designs and patents. In the United Kingdom, he has been appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng), and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In 2018, Ive was awarded the Professor Hawking Fellowship. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural writers, Ive was ranked the most influential person in British culture. His designs have been described as integral to the successes of Apple, which has went on to become the world's largest information technology company by revenue and largest company in the world by market capitalization.
On 27 June 2019, in an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Ive announced he would leave Apple after twenty-seven years to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, together with industrial designer Marc Newson. |