Jonathan Ive

Jonathan Ive, an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Ive was voted on website Fast Company 1st place in 100 most creative people for 2010.

The Sunday Times named Ive as one of Britain's most influential expatriates on 27 November 2005: "Ive may not be the richest or the most senior figure on the list, but he has certainly been one of the most influential as the man who designed the iPod."

Ive defined his overarching design principles as "simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment."

Today, Apple represents the success of business and design, as $32 billion in sales last year attest. And Ive --together with CEO Steve Jobs, have created the most trendsetting products. Apple is notoriously secretive about its design process (even most Apple employees are barred from the company's design lab); Ive's made a huge impact on Apple and the business community, states Robert Brunner, who, as Apple's previous design chief, hired Ive at the company and recommended him as his successor.

"He likes to make perfect stuff," says Brunner, offering the first of three keys to Ive's success. That design perfection -- the first touch-screen smartphone, the dominant MP3 player, the first titanium laptop -- has become the benchmark by which companies in all industries judge themselves. "I've even had a plumbing company say, 'We want our showerhead to be our version of the iPod,' " says Brunner, now a partner at the design firm Ammunition. "Ive has this design ability combined with a craftsmanlike mentality."

The second key is Ive's understanding of the interplay between design and manufacturing. Even when Ive was just out of school, before he joined Apple, Brunner recalls, "he showed us his work, and I was amazed. He had taken a phone and come up with a radical design, but it was so refined it could have been manufactured right then." At Apple, Ive has taken those insights one step further. Consider the new MacBook, which is carved from a single piece of aluminum and demands aeronautics-caliber precision. "[Apple] had to reinvent its factories to make it," Brunner explains. "It's mind-boggling." While most companies create designs that can be manufactured with existing equipment and processes, Ive and his team meet the problem halfway, often overhauling manufacturing to get "perfect" products built on a mass scale.

http://www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/jonathan-ive