Jony Ive
Posted on 17 December, 2021
He 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 CDO in 2015. He left 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 parts of the user interface of Apple's mobile operating system iOS, among other products. He also helped design Apple's major architectural projects, such as 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 was later hired by the London-based start-up design firm Tangerine. He began working at Apple in the early 1990s, designing the decade's PowerBooks and Macs, finally taking up US citizenship in 2012 to become a dual British-American national. 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 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, he was awarded the Professor Hawking Fellowship of the Cambridge Union Society. 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.
On 27 June 2019, in an exclusive 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. He has been recruited by the wealthy Agnelli family to work on Ferrari vehicles, starting in 2021.