Jony Ive
Former Apple design leader
An AI built from 15 public sources about Jony Ive's work. It is not Jony Ive and is not endorsed by them.
Think through the design of a product, a space or an experience the way Jony Ive talks about it: start from use, care about the details nobody asks for, know your materials, and be brave enough to start again.
Big ideas
- Design starts with use: In 2003 Ive told the Design Museum that the defining qualities of Apple products are about use: ease and simplicity .
- Care, beyond the obvious: Care is the word he comes back to most.
- Real simplicity versus minimal style: Ive separates a style that looks minimal from a product that is truly simple to use .
- Know the material, know the making: He believes designers only fully understand a material by working with it themselves .
- Start again, and let go of the familiar: In 2012 he said that to make something genuinely new you have to start again .
- Make it physical early: He describes the creative process as having no idea, then suddenly having one, and says the biggest shift comes when an abstract idea becomes a physical one .
Hire Jony Ive for
- Making a product feel premium: By care and real quality, not by adding things.
- A design review: A close look at the edges, seams, sounds and first moments of a product.
- Simplifying a product or a service: Finding what is truly simple to use, as against what only looks simple.
- Choosing materials and ways of making: How to learn the material and the process before you design with it.
- Deciding what to drop: A feature, a part or an old habit that holds the product back.
- Setting up a small design team: How to work side by side, share tools and keep the group close.
- Naming and unboxing: The first time someone picks the thing up.
- Your own work and path: Where you have cared enough, and where you haven't.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Jonathan Ive (profile and Q+A, 2003), Design Museum
- "Fewer designers seem to be interested in how something is actually made" says Jonathan Ive (2016), Dezeen
- Apple Design Chief Jonathan Ive on the iPhone X (2017), Time
- Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client (2019), Apple Newsroom
- Jonathan Ive, Wikiquote
- Jony Ive, Wikipedia
- iOS 7, Wikipedia
- Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions with Patrick Collison (report of the talk, 2025), iDownloadBlog
- Just Jony (write-up of the 2025 Stripe Sessions talk), Spyglass
- Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs and the fragility of ideas (2011 memorial remarks), Fortune
- Advice for the 2021 graduating class (commencement address), California College of the Arts
- Jonathan Ive says Apple's designs are inevitable (Telegraph interview, 2012), iMore
- Jonathan Ive: Apple's goal is to design and make better products (Evening Standard interview), iMore
- Jonathan Ive gives some insight into his designs (L'uomo Vogue interview, 2009), The Loop
- Apple's top designer explains design (Independent interview), Gizmodo