Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Ive - Page 3

The word design is everything and nothing. The design and the product itself are inseparable.

Different and new is relatively easy. Doing something thats genuinely better is very hard.

The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.

A beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly.

The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material - the material informs the form.

The goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products.

With the early prototypes, I held the phone to my ear and my ear [would] dial the number. You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin colour and hairdo... that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work.

Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.

We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.

Design is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.

The more I learnt about this cheeky - almost rebellious - company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had reason for being that wasn't just about making money.

We shouldn't be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing.

It's one of the curses of designing that when you look at anything, you're constantly thinking, Why? Why - why was it designed like that, and not like this?

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for.

A lot of what we are doing is getting design out of the way.

We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money.

Its difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.

Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.

As consumers we are incredibly discerning, we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed.

What we don't include is as important as what we do include.

True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go... Yeah, well, of course.

Titles or organizational structures, that’s not the lens through which we see our peers.

One of the hallmarks of the team is this sense of looking to be wrong. It's the inquisitiveness, and sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong, because then you've discovered something new.

Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.

That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.

But one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I'm aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.

I figured out some basic stuff: that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to.

We have always thought about design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It's the whole thing: the way something works on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience.

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.

Objects and their manufacture are inseparable, you understand a product if you understand how it's made.

Goal we've always had for design at Apple is to create solutions that are inevitable.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.

Simplicity is really hard.

We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care - just like the people who make them. But what we’ve shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made. We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness.

Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes.

We say no to a lot of things so we can invest an incredible amount of care on what we do.

We shouldn't be afraid to fail - if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% of the stuff in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.

It's just easier to talk about product attributes that you can measure with a number. Focus on price, screen size, that's easy. But there's a more difficult path, and that's to make better products, ones where maybe you can't measure their value empirically.

The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.

The memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.

The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.

I’m always focussed on the actual work, and I think that’s a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.

When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.

I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple’s tell-tale white earbuds. But I’m constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?

It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build an easier for people to work with.

I think it’s a wonderful view that care was important – but I think you can make a one-off and not care and you can make a million of something and care. Whether you really care or not is not driven by how many of the products you’re going to make.

It feels like each time we are beginning at the beginning, in a really exciting way.

And I said couldn't we be more moderate? And he said why? And I said because I care about the team. And he said, 'No Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you, because I thought you really held the work up as the most important and not how you are perceived by people.' People misunderstand Steve because he was so focused.

Apple's Jony Ive describes his "fanatical" approach to design in new interview