The amazing thing is that Apple (Steve Jobs?) succeeded in noticing this talented individual and promoting him to a position where his designs could be realized.

"With his dramatic return to the company in 1997, Steve Jobs began to revive Apple’s fortunes and return it to the industry leader that it is today. Jonathan Ive was instrumental to this turnaround, and under the new Jobs-led Apple he was promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design and began a period of unrivaled creativity and innovation which continues to this day." http://www.jonathanive.com/biography/

I think Steve Jobs noticed importance of production design during the time he worked on Next. I remembered an old profile for him in Time sometime around he going back to Apple. He criticized the design on laundry machines and used a rare German laundry machine that's very quiet in his house.

I am a programmer myself and I know I don't have so much talent in design. I noticed that at least in web industry before Web 2.0, web designers were treated pretty badly by most management teams because they think designers just need to type in some HTML code/cut and paste some photoshop and site is done. What they don't understand is a good designer has to put himself/herself into users' shoes and experiences it when they make design choice and a bad choice will kill the site.

I am actually happy that at least now when you meet a management team that ignores the importance of design, you can raise the popularity of good design such as iPod, iPhone as counter point to persuade them that a good design helps sales. In this part, I really appreciate what SJ and JI has been doing for rest of us.

" I noticed that at least in web industry before Web 2.0, web designers were treated pretty badly by most management teams because they think designers just need to type in some HTML code/cut and paste some photoshop and site is done."

It wasn't just the managers - the general view was that design == graphic design (nothing to do with usability). Plus graphic design students saw $$$ and suddenly went into web (I saw that a LOT, more so then any management problem).

A lot of it was the designers themselves. I remember one who genuinely believed "users like a challenge" and everything he came up with, from page layouts to actual workflow was like a puzzle.

Fine, except we were working on corporate intranets. He didn't last long.

I used to lecture at Northumbria where Ive studied. Everyone who knew him said he was a really reserved and pleasant guy who just truly loved to design. I think that Apples success lends itself substantially to this guy and his creative skill. He's definitely up there with Steve Jobs for helping the re-emergence of Apple

What I like is this sentence from Jonathan, "We don't have to take this great intuitive leap to understand the mythical concerns of our users, because we are the users."

But I guess we also need to have taste.

I know it's his name, but the OCD within makes me want to sed 's/Ive/I\'ve/g'

You can use it to your advantage at parties:

"Ive won two black pencils this year from D&AD!"

"If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file not a big book, he rarely gives interviews you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

What?

"If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file - not a big book, he rarely gives interviews - you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

It seems checking the results is no longer part of publishing.

"D&AD, as you'll have read elsewhere in this paper, is one of the most important dates in the creative industry calendar"

That's three paragraphs in, the fourth time that "D&AD" is used. It seems to be the important point of the article, being referred to maybe 50 times, yet the author never bothers defining it. WTF?

I'd never actually wished that there was a downmod button here before...