Jonathan Ive departed the UK for sunny California because of a man wearing a red clown nose, according to a profile of the Apple design supremo on the Daily Mail website.
At the time Jony Ive – the Essex-born guru behind the iMac, MacBook Air, iPod, iPad and iPhone – was working at a British design consultancy called Tangerine, headed by Clive Grinyer. And Grinyer says that Britain lost his talent after one particular incident.
Ive was presenting toilet designs to the Ideal Standard bathroom fittings company in Hull, only to have them ripped apart by a man wearing a red nose (it was Comic Relief day). Grinyer describes the man as a “clown” who decided to “throw his weight around” – and it seems that was the catalyst for Ive upping sticks for Cupertino and Apple.
According to the profile it took the return of Steve Jobs in 1997 to really bring Ive to the fore. He had been working on largely unnoticed prototypes for three years until Jobs passed by his studio and realised the Essex boy was onto something. In 1998 the Ive-designed CRT iMac was released and everybody else knew that too.
Then in 2001 Ive’s iPod arrived and cemented his place as one of Apple’s greatest assets. The rest is history, but the profile reveals some other interesting nuggets of info about the man: such as the fact that he visited Japan to watch samurai swords being forged, in order to better understand how to craft and strengthen the thin pieces of metal used in Apple products.
It also pours cold water on recent talk of Jony Ive leaving the US to return to Britain. A former colleague says that the last he heard, Ive was planning to sell his Somerset mansion – hardly the behaviour of a man who wanted to come back to Blighty.
Via Daily Mail
