Jonathan Ive Quotes

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.

There are 9 rejected ideas for every idea that works.

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

Its difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

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.

The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.

The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.

When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.

What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness.

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

There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.

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

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.

I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making.

Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great.

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

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

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

There are a thousand no's for every yes.

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

I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design.

I think it’s a wonderful view that care was important – but I think you can make a one-off and not care and you can make a million of something and care. Whether you really care or not is not driven by how many of the products you’re going to make.

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

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.

In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.

Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see... rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

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

Goal we've always had for design at Apple is to create solutions that are inevitable.

The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring.

Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.

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.

Objects and their manufacture are inseparable, you understand a product if you understand how it's made.

Simplicity is really hard.

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

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

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

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

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for.

Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural - it's so hard!

To do something innovative means that you reject reason.

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.

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.

That's an interesting thing about an object. One object speaks volumes about the company that produced it and its values and priorities.

Perhaps I'd like to design cars, but I don't think I'd be much good at it.

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

It's one of the curses of designing that when you look at anything, you're constantly thinking, Why? Why - why was it designed like that, and not like this?

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

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