Jony Ive reflects on design, Apple Watch in Vogue

By

Jony Ive

Vogue’s new profile of Apple’s head of design is a great read, especially because of the details it includes about Jony Ive’s work and personal life. For instance, Ive is in love with the “k-chit” noise the Apple Watch band makes it when it clasps.

The interview took place in a white room on Apple’s campus, which is fitting considering that Ive is always shrouded in white during his product design videos. Touching on the company’s secretive design studio, Vogue notes, “Ive’s wife, Heather Pegg, has never been—he doesn’t even tell her what he’s working on—and his twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not allowed in either.”

As also described in our own Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive biography, “work is conducted behind tinted windows, serenaded by the team’s beloved techno music, a must for the boss.”

“I find that when I write I need things to be quiet, but when I design, I can’t bear it if it’s quiet,” he says. Indeed, the design team is said to have followed an unwritten rule to move away from their work whenever the famously brusque Jobs entered the studio and turn up the volume so as to make his criticisms less audible, less likely to throw them off course.

Marc Newson and Jony Ive Photo: Vanity Fair
Marc Newson with his BFF Jony Ive. Photo: Vanity Fair

Ive appreciates working with physical objects, and he likes “drawing and making things—real things” with his ten-year-old boys. His wife, Heather Pegg, is a writer, which adds to the creative environment of home life.

It’s clear from Vogue’s profile that Ive and renowned designer/new Apple employee Marc Newson are really close friends. Ive even wears a pair of glasses designed by Newson.

“They’re a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth,” jokes Bono. They finish each other’s sentences. “They finish each other’s food,” adds Bono.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Vogue’s piece is its hands-on with the Apple Watch before it was announced.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” On my second visit to Cupertino, Ive has finally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is more watch than the computer geeks would ever have imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex wearer’s wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to me—weeks before the product’s exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO Tim Cook—in a situation room that has us surrounded by guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say, the weight of it, he nods. “Because it’s real materials,” he says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but solid snap, which he just loves as an interaction with design, a pure, tactile idea. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

Make sure to check out Vogue’s full profile for more.

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