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Jonathan Ive Named Designer of the Year
no_demons writes "Jonathan Ive, the man behind the iMac and the iPod, has won the first Designer of the Year award from the Design Museum in London. The Independent has the scoop, and BBC2 has the documentary on Wednesday, June 11th."
Now I want this guy to Design a PDA... Palm should hire him for their high end devices...
was responsible for the new bug? (No, I'm not blaming software glitches on him -- I mean the new beetle)
I went to a talk given by British invetor James Dyson (check out their Home Page) a few weeks back. He invented the "bagless vacuum cleaner" and one of his engineers' "inovations" was to have a clear case round the rubbish it sucked up. They thought it was cool. One of the most interested people in the design was Steve Jobs...The rest is history.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
As we're talking about Apple design ( heh ) this is one of the things that really surprised me when first using the e - the keyboard has very clean lines, nice key size and elevation, and very satisfying tactile response. The special keys are well laid out and chosen ( even if the contrast ones don't seem to be marked? ) and it even shipped with little plastic end-caps over the connector to protect it from dust / particles in shipping.
Its possibly one of the best keyboards I've ever used, including an old "clicky" IBM one I had in one of my old jobs. Is this also one of Ives designs? The only problem I have with it is that if it gets crap in it ( e.g., if you eat crackers at the keyboard while you're working ) the curvature of the transparent plastic optically blows them up into huge Godzilla Scale crumbs, which then attact mockery from nearby friends.
-- YLFI
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I slipped my iPod in my cargo pants "leg" pocket one day as I was getting out of the car. I had totally forgotten that it was there. The car door was partly shut and locked; so, I have it a good body slam with my thigh. My iPod took it head on and it was not broken, not dented, not nuttin.
Buying quality never paid off so well. A cheap mp3 box from Radio Snack would have been flat as a pancake.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
I have to admit the iPod design is pretty slick, but I remember a reading a story several months ago with a very convincing accusation that this guy stole the new iMac design from a European Mac enthusiest. Apparently a Mac webpage asked for people to submit designs and some guy posted pictures almost identical to the new iMac, long before the new iMac was released. Anyone know what ever happened to that story?
-Now we just need this guy to design a universal remote control since most designs suck-
- wo zniak/
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve
The Woz was one of the pioneers in the universal remote kick. Im suprised someone trolling wouldnt know such basic facts....
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Why don't the engineers who fit the stuff into these designs get any credit? Sure he comes up with a neat good looking idea, but it takes a hell of a lot more than a good idea to make a sucessful product. Someone actually needs to implement it and make it possible. I really doubt it was easy to fit a full computer inside the iMac base w/o a fan. Kudos to the 'geers.
Random is the New Order.
..is British (from Stafford), and not a bad drummer. Don't know if he still plays. My then drummer had bought his kit off him. Apple nabbed him in the very early nineties (or possibly the late eighties even), and dragged him off to the US. Prior to Apple, he was working for a design studio, in London I think.
-- Steve
Firstly, why doesn't Apple push the design edge further?
Ive never actually was a "bleeding edge" designer. He was always a conservatist - iMacs, G3 and G4, were revolutionary but at the same moment they were oddly familiar - like if you saw something like this before and always wanted to have one.
The one most likely to be "pushing an edge" was Hartmut Esslinger from the frogdesign company, responsible for the earliest Macs (Classic, SE etc.). This period of Apple design ended up in a disaster of the Mac portable, arguably the worst Macintosh ever made, now a true collector's item. Then there was the Robert Brunner period in Apple design, most famed by the failed Newton project. Thus the "pushing edge" designers were not always the best cure for the Apple situation.
Look that the Jonathan Ive's reign in Cupertino gives us no really shocking novelties. They just make desktops, laptops, TFT displays and portable music players. They don't try to launch Something That Never Existed Before - their new products are actually just improved versions of the thing you already knew. But they are well thought, well designed, and REALLY ease to use. Ive is not the kind of designer who want to shock the world with "pushing an edge" - he just want to design a device, that will be a true pleasure to use. Like an iPod. Or an iMac. Or an iBook. Etc.