Rob Waugh at Mail Online on Apple’s Jonathan Ive:
Ive is renowned for having an ‘alchemical’ sense for engineering, and the limits of what one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: ‘He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’
Ive’s lab is Apple’s inner sanctum. Here, touch screens control the glass-sided machines in which new products take form. Desks are bare bar the aluminum sheets that slot together to form the familiar lines of iconic products such as the MacBook Air.
Collectively, the designers obsess over each product, stripping away non-essential parts, reworking tiny details such as LED indicators on the sides of laptops and phones. Ive once spent months working solely on the stand for Apple’s desktop iMac; he was searching for the sort of organic perfection found in sunflower stalks.
Ive is probably the single most gifted industrial designer of our era.