Jony Ive

Jony Ive (officially Sir Jonathan "Jony" Paul Ive ; born 27 February 1967) is a British-American designer.

Ive is best known for his work at Apple Inc., where he served as senior vice president of industrial design and chief design officer.

Jonathan Paul Ive was born on 27 February 1967 in Chingford, London, United Kingdom.

His father, Michael Ive, was a silversmith who lectured at Middlesex Polytechnic, and his grandfather was an engineer.

Raised in London, Ive attended the Chingford Church of England School and Walton High School in Stafford where he studied sculpture and chemistry.

While attending secondary school, he was diagnosed with dyslexia.

Ive's designs at polytechnic garnered him the RSA Student Design Award in 1988 and 1989, which afforded him a small stipend and a travel expense account to use on a trip to the United States.

He travelled to San Francisco, California, where he met various designers including Robert Brunner – a designer who ran a small consultancy firm that would later join Apple Computer.

After returning to England six weeks later, Ive interned at product design agency Roberts Weaver Group (his college sponsor) where he impressed executives with a pronounced attention to detail and work ethic.

After a year with Roberts Weaver, Ive joined a London-based design agency called Tangerine, located in Hoxton Square.

He designed a diverse array of products, such as microwave ovens, toilets, drills and toothbrushes for clients including LG and Ideal Standard.

However, he became frustrated after he designed a toilet, bidet, and sink for Ideal Standard, and the company rejected the work, stating that the products were too costly and looked too modern.

He became unhappy with his clients who had different ideas.

He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts in industrial design in 1989.

From 1990 to 1992, Brunner tried to recruit Ive to Apple.

During this time, Apple became a client of Tangerine.

Ive worked on "Project Juggernaut" for Apple, investigating the future of portable computers and setting the stage for what would become the PowerBook.

Ive joined Apple in September 1992, and 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 Chief Design Officer in 2015.

He was formally recruited to Apple as a full-time employee in September 1992.

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 gone on to become the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization.

After leaving Tangerine to join Apple full time, he began designing the decade's PowerBooks and Macs, finally taking up US citizenship in 2012 to become a dual British-American national.

According to a March 2014 interview with Time, "It was his teenage love of cars that made Ive decide to become a designer. When he left school, he checked out a few car-design courses in London, including one at the Royal College. He swiftly changed his mind. 'The classes were full of students making vroom! vroom! noises as they drew,' he recalls, still horrified."

Ive decided to study industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic instead.

There he was exposed to a form of Germanic design which originated at the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus expressed the idea of only including what is needed into designs.

This philosophy can be seen in his work with Apple.

While at Newcastle, some of his designs – including a telephone and a hearing aid – were exhibited at the Design Museum in London.

He has been serving as chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London since 2017.

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.

Ive has received 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, he was awarded the Hawking Fellowship of the Cambridge Union Society.

He held that role until his departure from the company in July 2019.

Working closely with Jobs during their tenure together at Apple, Ive played a vital role in the designs of the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and the user interface of Apple's mobile operating system iOS, among other products.

He was responsible for the design of major architectural projects including Apple Park and Apple Stores.

Born in London, Ive lived there until his family moved to Stafford when he was 12.

He studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic, and later joined the London-based design firm Tangerine, where he worked on client projects for LG and Ideal Standard as well as Apple.

On 27 June 2019, in an interview with the Financial Times, Ive announced he would leave Apple after 27 years to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, together with industrial designer Marc Newson.

In 2021, he was recruited by the Agnelli family to work on Ferrari vehicles.