Games - Jonathan Ive

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	Games - Jonathan Ive

Jonathan P Ive CBE (born February 1967 in London) is Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Computer. Ive is credited with designing the iMac, a key product in turning Apple's fortunes at a difficult time for the company and reestablishing its reputation for mold-breaking products.

Ive was born in London and studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic before setting up his own design house, Tangerine, where he designed everything from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. Apple was one of his clients, and was so impressed with his work for them that in 1992 they offered him a job in their Cupertino headquarters to turn around their ailing design division. Until 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to the company and became interim CEO, Ive's influence at Apple was limited. Jobs recognized Ive's talent and chose him to lead the iMac project.

Since then, Ive has headed the industrial design team that produces most of Apple's major hardware products. Ive's team designed the original iMac and its successors, the original iBook and its successors, the Power Mac starting with the Blue and White Power Mac G3, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the PowerBook starting with the Titanium PowerBook G4 (or possibly earlier), the eMac, the Mac mini, the Xserve and Xserve RAID, the iPod family, the AirPort base station family, and the Apple Cinema Display and some later Studio Displays. The team has also assisted in the design of some third-party Mac accessories such as the Harman Kardon Soundsticks speaker system.

Under Ive's direction, Macs radically changed, becoming more stylish and functional than the Macs of the mid-1990s. For this reason, his works are powerful symbols of the "new Apple." After replacing Gil Amelio in an executive coup, Steve Jobs transformed the company, and nothing made the change in Apple's attitude more apparent, or impressed it more into the public mind, than Ive's Macs.

Phases

There have been distinct phases in Ive's designs for Apple. The first style appeared in 1998 with the iMac's release and was also evident in the clamshell iBook models and the Blue and White Power Mac G3, as well as the line of Studio Displays that accompanied the tower. This design is characterized by translucent candy-coloured and milky white surfaces with soft, bulging shapes. Subdued vertical pinstripes show through the translucent faces of these Macs and displays. Printed on the back panel for ports and agency approval marks is a lenticular plaque that contains a wavy 3D pattern. Even the power cords are translucent, showing the twist of wires within.

The translucency and colours in this style were inspired by gumdrop candies. In fact, Ive visited confectionery companies for advice on replicating a gumdrop's visual effect, and his team developed novel techniques in order to build it. The candy colour on the first iMac model is called "Bondi blue", evoking the colour of the sea at beaches such as Sydney's Bondi Beach.

On the iMac, "Bondi blue" was replaced with five fruit colours in January 1999, "Blueberry" (a bright blue); "Grape" (purple); "Tangerine" (orange); "Lime" (green); and "Strawberry" (pinkish red). Two of those, "Tangerine" and "Blueberry", became the first colours for the iBook. Blueberry was also the color for the Blue and White Power Mac G3 and its displays. These candy colors started a fad in consumer goods where everything from clock radios to hamburger grillers had transcluent bright plastic.

In late 1999, the fruit colours were joined by a quieter colour scheme called "Graphite", in which the coloured elements were replaced with a smokey grey and some of the white elements were made transparent. Graphite was the colour of the iMac Special Edition models and the first Power Mac G4. Next came "Ruby" (dark red), "Sage" (forrest green), "Indigo" (deep blue) and "Snow" (milky white) in 2000. The iBooks' colors were also updated: Blueberry was replaced with Indigo, Tangerine was replaced with Key Lime (an eye-popping neon green), and Graphite was added at the high end.

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