So when Brunner tried to recruit him again, this time he was ready to jump ship. They would fill the studio with prototypes and models if a client came to visit, making it look like they were working on very important projects. He and his partners had to constantly sell the business and hustle for new work. He was also frustrated by the realities of running a business. As so often happens, manufacturers would cut corners or make compromises, diluting his design work. Once he handed his work off to a client, it was up to them to see it through to a finished product. He couldn’t see projects through to their completion. He and his colleagues designed bathrooms and powertools, even a barber’s comb - which won another prestigious design prize.īut was frustrated and unhappy as a consultant.

Ive had fun as a designer in swinging-eighties London, and loved all the challenge of constantly working on different products. A few months later, Brunner moved to Apple and set up the company’s first internal design studio. Ive already had a job lined up in London, and felt obliged to decline.

Brunner was blown away by some of Ive’s student design work and immediately offered him a job. He visited another star designer, Robert Brunner, who was running his own small but successful design firm in Silicon Valley. He’d heard stories of the West Coast, and longed to see it for himself. The cash allowed him to realize a long-held dream of visiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Ive, then a star design student at Newcastle Polytechnic in the north of England, had won some money at university in - what else - a design competition.

In a roundabout way, Apple almost recruited Jony Ive right out of college. Jony Ive and the ‘Genius’ Behind Apple’s Move to Design-First

Jony ive design