Almost nothing was known about Jonathan Ive after leaving Apple in 2019. Today finally there is the first news, and it is sensational: the company of the former Apple designer and Mark Newson will collaborate with Ferrari. More: “In addition to collaborating with Ferrari, LoveFrom will explore a series of creative projects with Exor in the luxury business”, reads the official statement. Ive will also join Exor’s Partners Council, the annual forum of friends and partners who have achieved great success and share ideas and explore potential business opportunities.
Who is
54 years old, massive physique and shy gaze, Ive is determined, obsessive, paranoid in the attention to detail. He has a passion for cars, drives a black Bentley Mulsanne, an Aston Martin or a Range Rover. He made a sink for Ideal Standard, and advised director JJ Abrams to build the lightsaber of Star Wars. And above all he has signed some of the greatest commercial successes of the Apple and the best-selling gadgets of all time, entered in the history and in pop culture, and in the lives of billions of people around the world. As head of the interface, he then completely revised the appearance of the iOS and OS X operating system, introducing a new graphic style soon taken over by the competitors. For this reason, many have seen in Ive the true heir of Steve Jobs: the founder of Apple and the English designer have been united by a spiritual commonality, by a passion and an untiring dedication. Jobs himself had told it in Walter Isaacsson’s book, widow Laurene Powell Jobs confirmed it several times.
The meeting
We met Sir Jonathan Ive in 2017, at the launch of the iPhone X, which coincided with the presentation of the new Cupertino headquarters. He was tired and visibly excited: “I’ve been working on it for eight years, there hasn’t been a day that I haven’t thought about this place”, he told us, as he bought a dozen limited edition t-shirts for sale only in the Spaceship Store. at $ 40 each.
Apple Park is a crazy idea that comes true, a bit like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, all designed by Ive, in close contact with Steve Jobs. The Apple founder died on October 5, 2011, but four months before his last public outing was to attend a session of the Cupertino city council and introduce the new campus. The project was developed by the studio of English star architect Norman Foster, but Ive oversaw every detail. “I also designed the door handles,” he says. They are curved, made of metal, but everything is curved, and made of metal, glass, stone or wood. Curved are the walls of the Steve Jobs Theater, curved the edges of the roofs, the edges of the benches, the openings of the containers for paper towels in the bathrooms. The staircase of the Visitor Center is impressive, where the Apple Store and the cafeteria are located, the only two spaces open to the public: the handrail is made of blocks of composite material similar to stone, without edges, and is connected to the steps with a curve .
Apple Park is a workplace, but also a Zen symbol. The main building has a total area of 260,000 m2 and the entire Pentagon could find its place inside. It actually houses a lawn, a pond and fruit trees. Apricot trees, like the ones that grew up there in Jobs’s childhood, around what was then the headquarters of Hewlett Packard. “And when the plum trees grow it will be even more beautiful,” Ive tells us.
Aesthetics and ethics
The quality of the materials, the excellence of the finishes, the paranoid attention to detail are typical characteristics of Apple products, and have largely contributed to their success. There are many reasons for this, but there is also a design culture that is unrivaled in the history of consumer electronics. Only two exceptions, which not surprisingly served as a model for Jobs from the beginning of his adventure: Sony and Olivetti, companies capable of building a personal and innovative aesthetic language over time. Where there is no space for ornamentation and every choice is important: what is there cannot be missing, and what is not there must not be there. Thus aesthetics becomes ethics, and from beauty to the concept of right.
Plastic, for example: until recently it was not uncommon to find it disguised as metal, especially in gadgets and cheap electronic devices. Today it has disappeared, and even on the cheapest Chinese products it is difficult to see chromed plastic. When he introduced the iPhone 5c, Jonathan Ive said it was made of plastic “that doesn’t have to apologize”.
And then the aluminum, and the glass, so typical of Apple: finished to perfection but always so that their nature is evident. These are choices that denote intellectual coherence, transparency towards those who buy an object. The sincerity of the materials is an ethical choice, which refers to concepts such as quality, durability, the possibility of reuse and recycling.
Many have taken the lines and materials of Apple, and not only the iPhone (just think of computers, from the colorful iMac to the MacBook Air). However, no one has managed to invent a design culture like the one embodied by Jobs first and then by Ive. Because it is easy to say that today’s most famous industrial designer was inspired by another legendary designer, Dieter Rams, but the similarities between the iPod and the Braun radio of the seventies are not accidental, they are references to the same intellectual matrix .
Courses and resources
Jony Ive hadn’t been on stage for a long time to launch new products, at most he lent his British accent to Apple’s usual hi-tech porn video. “Even if I am no longer an employee, I will still be very involved – I hope for many, many years to come,” he told the Financial Times, commenting on the company’s success. “It seems a natural and opportune time to make this change.” On the other hand, the one with Apple was a relationship that lasted since 1990, a more unique case in the fast-paced world of technology, and for a curious short circuit, with LoveFrom Ive will return to the situation it was in before moving to Cupertino: in the end In the 1980s, when the collaboration began, he was in fact working in a company called Tangerine, where he was involved in the design of the first PowerBooks, among other things. He was hired only in 1992, and only then did he decide to leave London. The first product to bear his signature was Apple Newton, an innovative but unsuccessful personal assistant. Five years later, Ive was ready to leave the company, but it was then that Steve Jobs returned, and after the first meeting he appointed him vice president of the design, starting a collaboration that would have brought Apple back – then on the verge of bankruptcy – to become the first hi-tech company in the world.
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