Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (29 page)

A concept sketch for an electronic pen that wrote in different line widths and patterns.

Jony’s Zebra TX2 pen had a special mechanism at the top just for its owners to fiddle with. A tactile fiddle factor would be an ongoing motif in Jony’s work.

One of Jony’s projects at Newcastle reimagined the landline telephone. He called it the Orator.

These are some of Jony’s initial sketches for a power drill for UK manufacturer Kango.

Jony’s first major project at Apple was the redesigned Lindy MessagePad 110, which won him a bunch of design awards—but the product never really took off.

Like a lot of prototypes, Jony’s Lindy MessagePad was made in clear acrylic to check its thermal heat-dissipation.

This Baby Mac from frog design is the precursor to the iMac, and a good example of the Snow White design language. Steve Jobs was working on it when he quit/was fired from Apple in 1985.

Frog design’s Snow White aesthetic was so influential it set the design language for a generation of computers.

When Jony Ive joined Apple in 1992, the design team was slowly trying to move away from Snow White which had dominated the ‘80s.

The Domesticated Mac was one of Jony Ive’s first speculative designs for Apple. It was an attempt to design a computer for the home, not an office environment.

Another of Jony’s early major projects, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac was Apple’s first flatscreen computer. It was also designed for the home, not the office, but bungled pricing and marketing doomed it.

The eMate was Apple’s first translucent product. Jony felt that translucency made a product less mysterious and more accessible.

Jony Ive
(left)
with his former boss Jon Rubinstein, head of engineering, with some multicolored iMacs, the first product to bring fashion to computers.

Associated Press/Susan Ragan