Jonathan Ive Quotes

Simplification is one of the most difficult things to do.

It's actually a rare and precious thing to discover what it is you love to do, and I encourage you to remain unapologetically consumed by it. Be faithful to your gift and very confident in its value.

It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.

There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.

People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship.

Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.

I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.

Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn't just about making money.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.

It's very easy to make something that is new. So we are trying to make things that are better.

The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring.

We're very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter.

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great.

You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.

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

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

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

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

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

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

Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware really of the solution.

Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.

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 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.

If something is not good enough, stop doing it.

The best ideas start as conversations.

There are a thousand no's for every yes.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.

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.

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

To design something really new and innovative you have to reject reason.

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.

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

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.