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Jonathan Ive - Apple's Design Magician
conq writes "BusinessWeek takes an in-depth look at the man behind the Apple magic. The article features a slideshow with all his designs (including one before he was with Apple)." From the article: "During an internship with design consultancy Roberts Weaver Group, he created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. 'It immediately became the owner's prize possession, something you always wanted to play with,' recalls Grinyer, a Roberts Weaver staffer at the time. 'We began to call it having Jony-ness, an extra something that would tap into the product's underlying emotion.'"
You have to admit, the guy must have some creative genious in him. Looking at all those projects there isn't one that I didn't like. The only one that had me scratching my head a little bit about was the vertical fax. Of course, perhaps there was a reason to the madness of that. Regardless, the designs implemented by the groups he has worked with are great.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
By tucking the electronic guts of the Mac right behind the LCD display, Ive's team essentially made the PC disappear. Can someone explain why this won't be the future of PC design for anyone other than gamers--or why the rest of the industry hasn't followed suit yet?
Because that's called a laptop without a battery and is fuckin' pointless. Sure, it looks cool but once its outdated you throw it away. People don't like that with laptops but they put up with it because its portable. This aint, so why put up with it?
How we know is more important than what we know.
But where is it due. How many designers actually take credit for these things? If you dig around and see how many people claim to have had something to do with these designs, it becomes clear that a good chunk of this stuff is outsourced. And I'm not talking the nitty gritty stuff, I'm talking the conceptualizations as well. Don't get me wrong, the man's a genuis, but he isn't responsible for half this stuff.
if they did that the keyboard would be off-center, and that would drive you insane after a short period. as for the new imac, well, i imagine speakers wouldn't fit there, and there's not too much point in adding something there just for the sake of it being there
While I wouldn't mind a numeric keypad on my PowerBook either, I think you just demonstrated why you *aren't* a design genius, by putting the speakers directly under the user's wrists where they will be muffled, and where the grill is likely to accumulate dirt. I've used several laptops that placed the speakers under the wrists or on the front (like my Thinkpad), where they are often muffled by body parts, and it is highly irritating. Since the wider PowerBook has real estate on either side of the keyboard, it makes perfect sense to put the speakers there. Another point against your proposed addition of a numeric keypad--you would have to shift the keyboard and potentially the track pad off center, forcing the user to put their hands in a very unnatural position when typing on the alphanumeric keyboard.
I don't know what's scarier: Someone who's so homophobic he's afraid of colors, lest he be considered "one of those", or someone who's so inflexible that he won't consider modern designs because, once upon a time, the same company made a design he was afraid of.
Designers are not different then anyone else - but I think they are more aware of the internal processes in the act of design. I guess a book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" discusses it best. ( Though "Looking for Spinoza" is a good read, also)
When I start something like an assembler program, I find myself in an iterative, non-verbal mode. Only after I get a feeling of rightness can I wrestle the solution to the verbal level.
I use Tony Buzan's mind maps, and free phrase writing to capture the fleeting associations.
After about a day I write, expanding the resultant mess of factors into a chaos of text.
A day after that, I edit, and cut about one third or more of the text down.
This works well for me on stuff like specifications, test plans, and design documents, your mileage may vary. I can't comment on how it would work on fictional prose, or poetry.
I suspect that the rule, "first write, then edit", would still hold. As usual your mileage may vary...
The actual code is only about one-tenth of the work, figuring how to approach that part, and then verifying it is most of it. The rest of the documentation is to remind me later what the heck was I thinking!
Cheers, JB
This is progress?