Jonathan Ive Quotes & Sayings

I figured out some basic stuff: that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to. — Jonathan Ive

There is a clear goal and it isn't to make money. The goal is to desperately try to make the best products we can. We are not naive - if you trust it, people like it, they buy it and we make money. This is a consequence. — Jonathan Ive

And I said couldn't we be more moderate? And he said why? And I said because I care about the team. And he said, 'No Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you, because I thought you really held the work up as the most important and not how you are perceived by people.' People misunderstand Steve because he was so focused. — Jonathan Ive

There's no other product that changes function like the computer. — Jonathan Ive

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. — Jonathan Ive

One of the hallmarks of the team is this sense of looking to be wrong. It's the inquisitiveness, and sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong, because then you've discovered something new. — Jonathan Ive

So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve. — Jonathan Ive

It never ceases to amaze me what it takes to develop and bring to mass production a product. — Jonathan Ive

I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple's tell-tale white earbuds. But I'm constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better? — Jonathan Ive

I'm always focussed on the actual work, and I think that's a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make. — Jonathan Ive

The memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work. — Jonathan Ive

We're very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people. — Jonathan Ive

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity. — Jonathan Ive

The computer industry is creatively bankrupt. — Jonathan Ive

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. — Jonathan Ive

The best ideas start as conversations. — Jonathan Ive

It's just easier to talk about product attributes that you can measure with a number. Focus on price, screen size, that's easy. But there's a more difficult path, and that's to make better products, ones where maybe you can't measure their value empirically. — Jonathan Ive

We say no to a lot of things so we can invest an incredible amount of care on what we do. — Jonathan Ive

The emphasis and value on ideas and original thinking is an innate part of British culture, and in many ways, that describes the traditions of design. — Jonathan Ive

Design is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing. — Jonathan Ive

People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship. — Jonathan Ive

Simplicity is really hard. — Jonathan Ive

Make each product the best it can be. Focus on form and materials. What we don't include is as important as what we do include. — Jonathan Ive

Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging. — Jonathan Ive

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times. — Jonathan Ive

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design. — Jonathan Ive

Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn't just about making money. — Jonathan Ive

Objects and their manufacture are inseparable, you understand a product if you understand how it's made. — Jonathan Ive

With the early prototypes, I held the phone to my ear and my ear [would] dial the number. You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin colour and hairdo ... that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn't going to work. — Jonathan Ive

As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. — Jonathan Ive

I left London in 1992, but I'm there 3-4 times a year, and love visiting. — Jonathan Ive

We have always thought about design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It's the whole thing: the way something works on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience. — Jonathan Ive

The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. — Jonathan Ive

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products. — Jonathan Ive

There is beauty when something
works and it works intuitively. — Jonathan Ive

Apple's Industrial Design team is harder to get into than the Illuminati, and part of the reason is because no one leaves. In the last 15 years, not one of the 18 designers has ditched Apple for greener pastures. — Jonathan Ive

It's very easy to make something that is new. So we are trying to make things that are better. — Jonathan Ive

Eight years of work can be copied in six months. It wasn't inevitable that it was going to work. A stolen design is stolen time. — Jonathan Ive

Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs'] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren't good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around. — Jonathan Ive

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness. This relates to respect for each other and carelessness is personally offensive. — Jonathan Ive

The word design is everything and nothing. The design and the product itself are inseparable. — Jonathan Ive

To design something really new and innovative you have to reject reason. — Jonathan Ive

It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build an easier for people to work with. — Jonathan Ive

We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money, — Jonathan Ive

There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is. — Jonathan Ive

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company. — Jonathan Ive

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great. — Jonathan Ive

As consumers we are incredibly discerning, we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed. — Jonathan Ive

I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making. — Jonathan Ive

Apple's Jony Ive describes his "fanatical" approach to design in new interview — Jonathan Ive

In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves
'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials. — Jonathan Ive

That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities. — Jonathan Ive

Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes. — Jonathan Ive

It's a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I'm aware of designers wagging their tails in my face. — Jonathan Ive

We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn. — Jonathan Ive

It is sad that so many designers don't know how to make. CAD software can make a bad design look palatable! It is sad that four years can be spent on a 3D design course without making anything! People who are great at designing and making have a great advantage. — Jonathan Ive

The goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products. — Jonathan Ive

Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural - it's so hard! — Jonathan Ive

A lot of what we are doing is getting design out of the way. — Jonathan Ive

When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. — Jonathan Ive

True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, 'Yeah, well, of course.' Where there's no rational alternative. — Jonathan Ive

It's one of the curses of designing that when you look at anything, you're constantly thinking, Why? Why - why was it designed like that, and not like this? — Jonathan Ive

At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people. — Jonathan Ive

That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one. — Jonathan Ive

I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care. — Jonathan Ive

The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material
the material informs the form, — Jonathan Ive

It's actually a rare and precious thing to discover what it is you love to do, and I encourage you to remain unapologetically consumed by it. Be faithful to your gift and very confident in its value. — Jonathan Ive

When you do everything to make the very best product, it also means you're very focused on just a few products. — Jonathan Ive

Titles or organizational structures, that's not the lens through which we see our peers, — Jonathan Ive

If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to. — Jonathan Ive

There are 9 rejected ideas for every idea that works. — Jonathan Ive

It feels like each time we are beginning at the beginning, in a really exciting way. — Jonathan Ive

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. — Jonathan Ive

Goal we've always had for design at Apple is to create solutions that are inevitable. — Jonathan Ive

To do something innovative means that you reject reason. — Jonathan Ive

Different' and 'new' is relatively easy. Doing something that's genuinely better is very hard. — Jonathan Ive

The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function. — Jonathan Ive

A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end. — Jonathan Ive

When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole. — Jonathan Ive

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds. — Jonathan Ive

I like to work in a small team. There is only 18 of us on the design team. Nobody has ever left. — Jonathan Ive

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for. — Jonathan Ive

Our goal is to desperately make the best products we can. We're not naive. We trust that if we're successful and we make good products, that people will like them. And we trust that if people like them, they'll buy them. And we figured out the operation and we're effective. We know what we're doing, so we'll make money, but it's a consequence. — Jonathan Ive

You learn a lot about vital corporations through non-vital corporations. — Jonathan Ive

There are a thousand no's for every yes. — Jonathan Ive

We won't be different for different's sake. Different is easy ... make it pink and fluffy! Better is harder. Making something different often has a marketing and corporate agenda. — Jonathan Ive

My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself. — Jonathan Ive

Good is the enemy of great. — Jonathan Ive

The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental. — Jonathan Ive

If something is not good enough, stop doing it. — Jonathan Ive

Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see ... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better. — Jonathan Ive

Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. — Jonathan Ive

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was. — Jonathan Ive

One thing most people don't know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer. — Jonathan Ive

Why is it when we have a bad experience with a product, we assume it is us, but a bad experience with food, we blame the food?! — Jonathan Ive

I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design. — Jonathan Ive

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable. — Jonathan Ive

A beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly. — Jonathan Ive

Perhaps I'd like to design cars, but I don't think I'd be much good at it. — Jonathan Ive

When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product. — Jonathan Ive