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Apple's design wizard has not left the building [San Jose Mercury News, Calif.](San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 04--He was the resident wizard at 1 Infinite Loop, the guy sporting minimalist attire, closely cropped hair and a mischievous smile as he pulled one delightful new Apple (AAPL) product after another out of his sleeve. Now he's left the building. Or has he? Unlike former CEO Steve Jobs, whose recent resignation unleashed a torrent of speculation about Apple's future, Jonathan Ive isn't going anywhere. Known as "Jony" to friends, Apple's London-born designer-in-chief packs a spectacular track record -- think iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad -- that reflects the magic many find embedded in the gadgets that have made Apple the most valuable tech company in the world. In Jobs' wake, Ive more than anyone else may define the way Apple creations look and feel in the future. "Jony Ive has been endowed with this very powerful sense of ownership over the Apple design ethos, and as long as he's there, Apple's in good shape," said Scot Herbst, a Silicon Valley product designer who did extensive work on Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) touch-screen desktop computer. "Steve Jobs was great at formulating a single vision, but he wasn't some magical seer. Apple is loaded with talented people, and Ive is one of the best." It's unclear whether the end of the close collaboration between Jobs and Ive -- who creatively seemed to finish each other's sentence and together share 200 patents for their work -- will mean the eventual disruption of one of the most seductive product lines in history. But there are plenty of observers who believe that Ive's own Jobs-like obsession with simplicity and grace in design should be enough to sustain Apple's campaign of technological awe. Neither Ive, who lives with his wife and twin sons in San Francisco, nor Apple would comment for this story. But with Jobs' resignation, along with questions about what his absence might mean for the storied Cupertino company, observers have focused laserlike on the man who would be Apple's ultimate design king. Ive clearly found a kindred soul in his boss. Jerry Manock, Apple's early design guru and collaborator on the original Macintosh computer, said Jobs' passion for design, evident in everything from his adoration of Mercedes-Benz and Sony products to his fussing over what color to paint the walls of Apple's old Fremont factory, has been woven forever into the corporate cloth. "Steve felt that if you paint the walls black, you'd get a different feeling about the factory than if you painted it yellow," Manock said. "It all fit in with this overall feeling for the excellence of the product. And with enough people around him like Jony Ive who know what his values are, I've no doubt that that same kind of ethos for Apple products will continue, both in function and aesthetics." Notoriously shy and widely revered by his peers, the 44-year-old Ive has largely remained out of the public eye since joining Apple in 1992, even as millions around the world have enjoyed his smooth-edged tributes to form following function. As British design critic Stephen Bayley put it, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design "thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence." Working closely with his boss ever since Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Ive and his team have used their high-tech laboratory to crank out one hit after another. Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked on Ive's team for three years, described the Jobs-Ive partnership to one journalist as "an amazing synergy. It's about the leader of a company valuing design and the leader of design valuing the company." The two men seemed to share the same vision. Both believe in design that takes the "fear" out of a product, sizing and positioning a device's features so they work in an almost intuitive way. Both subscribe to a philosophy of minimalism that is expressed in everything from a computer's understated silhouette down to its Spartan packaging. Then there's that shared devotion to detail, which drove Jobs to kill the iMac's cooling fan "because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time," and prompted Ive to spend hours in a candy factory seeking inspiration for the iMac's now-iconic color scheme. Yet even without Jobs' unbridled, if sometimes brusque, enthusiasm for new ideas, along with his Toscanini-like ability to orchestrate various teams and rally them around a single vision, Ive's design prowess is an integral part of Apple's DNA, analysts say. "As long as Jobs has breath in him, he'll have input on design," said Tim Bajarin with Creative Strategies. "But he has put so much trust in Jony Ive at the design level that he's leaving Apple in more than capable hands. Ive is the one who always gets the lines and curves just right. He's the guy who ultimately has that real inner sense of what makes Apple products so elegant." Hardware design, though, is certainly not the only area of Apple where Jobs has left his mark. Part of Jobs' genius was to "create the underlying software that nobody else can touch and that makes products like the iPhone so powerful," said consultant Mike Murdock, who once worked at Pixar, the computer-animation studio Jobs bought for $10 million in 1986 then later sold to Disney for $7.4 billion after releasing megahits like "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life." "That's Steve," Murdock said. "But it's also the software-design group where he's created an amazing team of people to carry it forward and not screw it up." Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, said, "The next five years at Apple will be very much like the last five. They've been busy running the company during Jobs' medical leaves and nothing has really changed. With the creativity of people like Ive, they'll go on to even greater success. "After all," he said, "Jobs' greatest product was not the iMac or the iPhone -- it was Apple itself. He's built an amazing machine there, and it'll run just fine without him." Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689. Follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc. ___ (c)2011 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |