Johnathan Ive

Jonathan Ive is an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Design at Apple Inc. He was born on the 27th of February 1967 in Chingford, London. He has been the lead designer for Apple since 1997 and directly responsible for most of the company's recent hits: the iPhone, iPod, iPad and MacBook Pro. He has been honoured with many awards for his work and has been named 'The Most Influential Person in British Culture' by the BBC in 2005.



During Ive's high school years he was passionate about cars and it was this interest that led to his later carers as a designer. He eventually elected to study industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic.

Ive's first design assignment at Apple was the iMac. He runs his own laboratory at Apple, in which he oversees the work of his appointed design team, and he is the only Apple designer with a private office. Only his core team—which consists of a team of around 15 people from Britain, America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand who have worked together for around two decades—and top Apple executives are allowed into the laboratory, as it contains all of the concepts, including prototypes, that the design team is working on.


In an interview, Ive stated that he hopes that his best work is yet to emerge and that he prefers to be identified as a maker of products, rather than a designer. He believes that there is "a resurgence of the idea of craft" in 2014.