Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (8 page)

Despite his intentions to build a dream team, about eighteen months passed before Brunner began hiring in earnest. He needed to make the case for more resources with Apple executives but, perhaps more important, he had to come up with a cool place for the designers to work.

“[The studio] was essential to recruiting talent,” Brunner said. “I can’t have people working in cubicle hell. They won’t do it. I have to have an open studio with high ceilings and cool shit going on. That’s
just really important. It’s important for the quality of the work. It’s important for getting people to do it.”
⁵

Brunner found part of the answer in an underutilized building that Apple was leasing at 20730 Valley Green Drive. Called Valley Green II, or VGII, the building was a large, low-slung Spanish-style stucco structure surrounded by a few small trees and a big parking lot. Not far from Apple’s main campus, Valley Green Drive is on the other side of De Anza Boulevard, the main road through the center of Cupertino. Almost all of the buildings in the area are leased by Apple, making this part of Cupertino look like a company town. Apple’s first office, on Bandley Drive, is just around the corner.

Brunner took over half of the building, a big open space with twenty-five-foot-plus ceilings. He would share the building with Apple’s Creative Services group, known as Apple’s “In-House Design Consultants,” who were called on to produce things like brochures, manuals, in-store posters and displays and video promos.

Another crucial consideration for Brunner was that the building was not directly under the noses of Apple’s meddlesome executives. “I liked that it was off the beaten path.”

Brunner worked with Studios, a big San Francisco architecture and design firm, to transform the interior into an appealing design studio. Apple’s practice was to use standardized office furniture from Herman Miller, the company credited with inventing the cubicle, but Brunner didn’t assemble it into cubes. Instead, the desks were arranged in unusual formations around the space. “We used the taller structures as spines running around the studio and the work spaces running off it,” said Brunner. “The corporate planning people didn’t get it. They said you can’t do that, but that’s what we did, put it together in different ways. It totally freaked them out. It was great, a lot of fun. We just made it less oppressive.”

Brunner had a CAD workstation installed for creating 3-D models
of designs along with a computer numeric controls (CNC) milling machine to turn the CAD models into foam ones and a paint shop for testing different colors.

“The ID studio at Apple was a cool work space,” recalled Rick English, a photographer who did a lot of work with Apple in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, English contributed photos to Kunkel’s book about the design group,
AppleDesign
, but he also worked with a lot of other design studios in the Valley. To his eye, Apple seemed different. It wasn’t just the tools and their focus; the place was rapidly populated with designer toys, too, including spendy bikes, skateboards, diving equipment, a movie projector and hundreds of films. “It fostered this really creative, take-a-risk atmosphere, which I didn’t see at other firms,” said English.
⁶

When Brunner began recruiting in earnest, he initially found attracting talent difficult. Apple had no reputation for doing its own design, having outsourced it to Frog, and talented, ambitious designers were more inclined to go to firms with a strong creative history like the Bay Area’s IDEO.

To help with recruiting, Brunner took a leaf from Tangerine’s playbook and started promoting his work through design magazines. He created mock-ups of fantastical Apple products and ran big glossy photos of them on the back of
I.D.
magazine, the international design bible. One was a gigantic bicycle navigation computer that showed maps and local landmarks on a black-and-white screen. Another was a chunky wristwatch computer the size of a cantaloupe.

“They were concepts, not real products,” said Brunner. “They started to get attention. It was totally recruiting. No other reason. They were sketchy, information appliance models. A little bit tongue in cheek, but it served its purpose.”
⁷

•   •   •

Over time, Brunner recruited a team of talented designers, some of whom would remain with Apple for decades and be responsible for a
string of hit products, including the iPhone and iPad. Key members of Brunner’s team were Tim Parsey, Daniele De Iuliis, Lawrence Lam, Jay Meschter, Larry Barbera, Calvin Seid and Bart Andre.

Daniele De Iuliis (day-YOU-lease) was perhaps the most precocious of the group. Born in Bristol, United Kingdom, of Italian descent, De Iuliis was a graduate of the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. Brunner hired him in 1991 from the San Francisco office of design group ID Two (where Jony’s friend Clive Grinyer had earlier worked).

Brunner specifically wanted designers with experience in consulting. “After experiencing the inertia that exists inside Apple, Bob realized that by hiring former consultants he could operate with the speed and efficiency of a freelance group,” said Tim Parsey. “As a former consultant, Bob knew that we would think and act like consultants.”
⁸

Fellow designer Barbera was impressed with De Iuliis’s personality right away: “Danny, in particular, gave off that weird light that other designers tend to notice. I took one look at him and figured that our work was gonna get a lot better, fast.”
⁹

De Iuliis was able to imbue his designs with strong personality, a skill that served him well later on. One of his early projects was the Macintosh Color Classic, an update of the original Mac that exuded character and was avidly collected by fans for years. He would later work on the MacBook Pro and the iPhones 4 and 5. His name appears on more than 560 patents. They’re vast and varied in scope, including innovations in 3-D cameras, multi-touch displays, location tracking, RFID transponders, nitriding stainless steel, magsafe charging mechanisms, the iPod and improved speaker enclosures.

Later in his career, De Iuliis would receive top design awards for his work. Once Jony joined the team, the two developed a strong relationship. De Iuliis and Jony lived close to each other in San Francisco, and commuted together for more than twenty years.

In 1992, Brunner recruited Bartley K. Andre (known as Bart), a graduate of the University of California at Long Beach and an intern in Apple’s Personal Intelligent Electronics, or PIE group. He would emerge as one of the top five patent holders in the United States on a year-to-year basis (thanks to his last name, he is listed on all of Apple’s major patents in the title: “United States Patent Application Andre et al.”). By 2013, Andre had more patents to his name than any other Apple designer, including Jony. In 2009 alone, he received 92 patents; in 2010, his 114 set a record for an Apple designer. Most of the patent awards were for innovations on the phone, tablet and laptop lines.

Andre worked on everything at ID, from circuit modules to RFID systems. He was credited with the design of Apple’s 035 design prototype of the first iPad, according to information released during the
Apple v. Samsung
trial in 2012. Along with other members of the team, he several times received the prestigious Red Dot Award, from Germany’s Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen institute.

Daniel J. Coster joined the team after Jony, arriving in June 1994. Described as “tall, goofy [and] super-talented,” Coster had earned an ID degree from the Wellington Polytechnic School in New Zealand in 1986. Initially hired on a three-month contract, he impressed the group with work on colors and finishes for the Newton portable, then was hired full time. He designed various towers and gained notice for being the lead designer of the Bondi Blue iMac. Like his coworkers, Coster rapidly accumulated patents, receiving nearly six hundred working for Apple over the last two decades. In 2012, Coster was inducted into his alma mater’s design Hall of Fame for “an outstanding contribution to New Zealand’s economy, reputation and national identity through art and design.”
¹⁰

When Jony joined the team, his arrival was much anticipated. “Bob knew the effect that a strong new designer would have on the group,”
said Meschter. “When Daniele De Iuliis and Tim Parsey first arrived, our whole approach to design changed. But when Jonathan came on board . . . the group really took off.”
¹¹

•   •   •

To run the group like an outside consultancy but within Apple, Brunner set up a loose management structure that largely persists today. The designers always worked together on whatever project the group was working on. “We’d work on multiple projects, and move from project to project, pretty much the way he [Jony] does it today,” Brunner explained.
¹²

Brunner also made about half a dozen of the designers “product line leaders” (PLLs) for Apple’s major product groups: CPUs, printers, monitors and so on. The PLLs acted as liaisons between the design group and the company, much in the way an outside design consultancy would operate. “The product groups felt there was a contact within the design group,” Brunner said. “They managed the communication and the different needs of each group. I didn’t know any better. I ran it like the Lunar studio. There’d be discussion of a project. We’d design it, make it and ship it.”
¹³

As Apple grew and thrived, riding the desktop publishing revolution and the exploding market for PCs, the group found itself with a massive workload. “We had an enormous number of products in the pipeline,” said Brunner. “Two lines of desktops, monitors, printers, mobile products. Way too many. It was an enormous amount of work. More than we could handle.”

The production schedules also got shorter and shorter. When Brunner first started at Apple, the product development cycle was eighteen months or more. “It was crazy generous,” Brunner said. “You had an amazing amount of time to make something work.” Within a couple of years, however, the product development cycle shrank to
twelve months, then nine, and sometimes even six months if the product was needed in a hurry.

“All of a sudden, what got compressed was our thinking time,” Brunner said. “It still took just as long to implement something, but the time to explore, to test and to play with, just went away.”

Another challenge to Brunner and his crew was that Apple’s internal culture heavily favored the engineers within the product groups: The design process was engineering driven. In the early days of Frog Design, the engineers had bent over backward to help implement the design team’s ambitions, but now the power had shifted. The different engineering groups gave their products in development to Brunner’s group, who were expected to merely “skin” them.

Brunner wanted to shift the power from engineering to design. He started thinking strategically. His off-line “parallel design investigations” were a key part of his strategy. “We began to do more longer-term thinking, longer-term studies around things like design language, how future technologies are implemented, what does mobility mean?” The idea was to get ahead of the engineering groups and start to make Apple more of a design-driven company, rather than a marketing or engineering one. “We wanted to get ahead of them, so we’d have more ammunition to bring to the process.”
¹⁴

For every skin job Brunner did for engineering, he’d launch up to ten different parallel design directions. It sometimes seemed that such investigations were set up as competitions. He’d have several designers—inside the group and out—submit initial concepts. “It was almost like a competition, which Bob encouraged,” said English. “Then, when one of those designs was selected it became that designer’s baby all the way ’til completion.”

The Juggernaut project with Jony at Tangerine had been one such parallel investigation, and several others unfolded with outside agencies
like Lunar and IDEO. (This practice continues to this day at Apple, although both Jony and Steve Jobs avoided admitting it publicly.) The parallel design investigations also allowed the overworked design team to work with talented designers not on the Apple payroll. “Sometimes we wanted to hire specific designers to act as part of the team, to use them as freelance talent,” Brunner said.

Brunner was good at getting attention for the group, which inevitably led to design awards. Every month, Brunner ran ads on the rear cover of
I.D.
magazine. No longer limited to blue-sky concepts, Brunner published photos of designer prototypes, mostly to give his designers attention and make them feel good. It was an expensive motivational tool (Rick English said he was billing the company at least $250,000 a year in those days), but some of the work that the team had done was soon displayed in the studio as big photos on the wall.

Everything was documented. English and another photographer, Beverley Harper, photographed all the finished designs and a lot of the concepts. As they moved away from beige boxes, the designers felt the work deserved to be recorded. “The mind-set was that there was going to be a historical archive of all the things they worked on,” said English. “They absolutely believed that their work had such importance.” The habit lived on, as Jony’s design group continues to document everything it does today.

In hindsight, Brunner’s choices—the studio’s separation from the engineering groups, its loose structure, the collaborative workflow and consultancy mind-set—turned out to be fortuitous. One of the reasons Apple’s design team has remained so effective is that it retains Brunner’s original structure. It’s a small, tight, cohesive group of extremely talented designers who all work on design challenges together. Just like the designers had done at Lunar, Tangerine and other small agencies. The model worked.

Jony’s first big assignment at Apple was to design the second-generation Newton MessagePad. The first Newton hadn’t yet been released, but the design team already hated it. Thanks to a rushed production schedule, the first model had some serious flaws that Apple’s executives, as well as the designers, were eager to fix.

Just before the Newton was shipped, Apple discovered that the planned lid to protect its delicate glass screen wouldn’t clear expansion cards, which were to be inserted into the slot at the top. The design group was charged with developing some quickie carrying cases, including a simple leather slipcase, and off it went into the marketplace. In addition, the Newton’s loudspeaker was in the wrong place. It was in the palm rest, so the user tended to cover it up when holding the device.

The hardware engineers wanted the second-generation Newton (code-named Lindy) to have a slightly larger screen for better handwriting recognition. Since the pen was attached awkwardly to the side, a kludge that gave the Newton extra width, they wanted the new version to be significantly thinner; the original was so bricklike, only the largest of jacket pockets could accommodate it.

Jony worked on the Lindy project between November 1992 and January 1993. To get a grip on the project, he began with its design “story”—that is, by asking himself,
What’s the story of this product
? The Newton was so new and versatile and unlike other products, that articulating what it was primarily used for wasn’t easy. It morphed into a different device depending on what software it was running, so it could be a notepad or a fax machine. CEO Sculley called it a PDA but, for Jony, that definition was just too slippery.

“The problem with the first Newton was that it didn’t relate to
people’s everyday lives,” Jony said. “It didn’t offer a metaphor that users could grasp.” He set about fixing that.
¹⁵

To most people a lid is a just lid, but Jony gave it special attention. “It’s the first thing you see and the first thing you interact with,” Jony said. “Before you can turn the product on, you must first open the lid. I wanted that moment to be special.”
¹⁶

To enhance that moment, Jony designed a clever, spring-loaded latch mechanism; when you pressed the lid, it popped open. The mechanism depended on a tiny copper spring carefully calibrated to give just the right amount of pop.

To allow the lid to clear any expansion cards in the slot on top, Jony created a double hinge to allow the lid to clear any obstructions. When the lid was open, it flipped up and over the back to be stored out of the way. That conveyed something to the user too. “Pushing the lid up and around the back was important because the action is not culturally specific,” Jony noted at the time.

“Folding the lid to the side, like a book, created problems because people in Europe and the U.S. would want to open it on the left whereas people in Japan would want to open it on the right. To accommodate everyone, I decided the lid would have to open straight up.”
¹⁷

Next, Jony turned his attention to the “fiddle factor,” the special nuances that would make the product personal and special. The Newton was pen based, so Jony focused on the pen, which he knew users would love to play with. Jony’s solution to the challenge of reducing width and integrating the pen into the MessagePad itself was a storage slot at the top. “I insisted the lid fold up and over the top, like a stenographer’s notepad, which everyone understands [and] . . . users saw Lindy as a notepad. The stored pen at the top, where a stenographer’s notepad’s spiral binding would be, made the right connection.

“That became a key element of the product’s story.”
¹⁸

The slot was too short for a full-size stylus, so Jony created a stylus that cleverly telescoped. Like the lid, the pen featured a pop-up mechanism that made it pop out when the user pressed its top. To give it weight and heft, he fashioned the pen from brass.

His colleagues all went nuts for it. “Lindy was Jonathan’s shining moment,” said fellow designer Parsey.
¹⁹

On top of all this, Jony was under an extremely tight deadline with enormous pressures to delivƒer. The first edition of Apple’s pioneering handheld device had been doomed by the
Doonesbury
cartoon that came to define it. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau depicted the Newton’s handwriting recognition as hopeless, delivering a gut punch to the device from which it never recovered. Thanks to Trudeau, the first Newton MessagePad had to be replaced as quickly as possible.

The pressure fell to Jony. “When you’re aware of the lost revenue each day the schedule slips, it tends to focus your attention,” he said with typical British understatement.
²⁰

To the amazement of his colleagues, Jony was able to go from the initial design to the first foam concept models in two weeks, the fastest anyone had seen. Jony was determined to finish the project on time, and he traveled to Taiwan to fix manufacturing problems. He camped out in a hotel near the factory where the Newton would be made. He and a hardware engineer troubleshot the pen’s pop-up mechanism in his hotel room.

Parsey remembered Jony pushing himself to create something special. “To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product. At the level that Jonathan was working, it becomes like a love affair. The process is exhilarating . . . and exhausting. But unless you’re willing to give everything to the work, the design will not be great.”
²¹

When it was done, Jony’s colleagues were stunned and impressed with both the new Newton and Jony, who had joined the team only
months earlier. Apple executive Gaston Bastiaens, who was in charge of Newton, told Jony he would win every single design award. He nearly did. After Lindy’s introduction in 1994, Jony won several of the top awards in the industry: the Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award, the Industrie Forum Design Award, Germany’s Design Innovation Award, a Best of Category award from the
I.D.
Design Review and the honor of being featured in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

One of the things about Jony that struck Rick English was Jony’s dislike of awards. Or, rather, his dislike for receiving awards in public. “Even early on, Jony Ive stated that he was not going to go to those events,” said English. “That was interesting behavior because it was really different. He hated going up on stage and receiving awards.”

Jony’s Newton MessagePad 110 was on the market by March 1994, only six months after the original Newton went on sale. Unfortunately, no amount of fiddle factor was enough to save the Newton, as Apple made a series of blunders marketing it, both rushing the first device to market before it was ready and hyping its capabilities. In the face of unrealistic expectations, the Newton never reached critical mass. Both generations of Newtons were also plagued with battery problems and the poor handwriting recognition that Trudeau mocked. Not even Jony’s stellar design work could save it.

Phil Gray, Jony’s old boss at RWG, remembers seeing Jony in London just after his MessagePad 110 came out. “The Newton was like a brick in retrospect, but at the time was a handheld device that no one had done before,” Gray said. “Jony was frustrated because although he had worked really hard on it, he had to make a lot of compromises because of the engineering elements. Afterwards, at Apple, he went on to be in a position where he not only could influence engineering but also manage and control those processes.”

The MessagePad also marked an important transition in Apple’s manufacturing strategy. The MessagePad 110 was the first Apple product outsourced entirely to Taiwan. Apple had partnered with Japanese companies before (Sony for monitors, Canon for printers), but generally made its products in its own factories. For the MessagePad 110, Apple outsourced the Newton to Inventec. “They did a really amazing job, it went really well,” Brunner said. “The quality turned out to be really high. I credit Jony with that. He basically broke his back, spent an enormous amount of time in Taiwan getting that thing just right. It was beautiful. Well executed. It worked really well. It was an amazing product.”

That decision initiated a growing reliance on outside contractors to build Apple products, a practice that would become controversial a decade later.

Soon after completing the Lindy project, Jony had an idea to simplify the design of Apple’s bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors, which were perhaps the least sexy of Apple’s products and among the most expensive to manufacture. Because of their size and complexity, the molds for each of the plastic monitor housings—and there were dozens of models at the time—could cost more than a million dollars to tool.

To save money, Jony came up with the idea of a new case design with interchangeable parts, which could be adapted for several monitor sizes. Previously, monitor cases came in two parts: the bezel (a face frame that cradles the front of the cathode-ray tube) and the bucketlike housing that encloses and protects the CRT’s back. Jony’s idea was to split the case into four parts: the bezel, a mid-bucket and a two-part back bucket. The modular design would allow the mid- and back bucket to remain the same across the product line. Only the front bezel would come in different sizes to accommodate different-sized monitors.

In addition to saving money, the new case would be better looking,
its trimmer design allowing for a tighter fit around the different CRTs, making them appear smaller and more sculptural. Jony’s design introduced a couple of new elements into the group’s design language, including new treatments for vents and screws. “The new approach is more subtle,”
²²
said designer Bart Andre, who designed the actual enclosures based on Jony’s idea. His work seemed to attract everybody’s attention.