Jonathan Ive
When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely.
I think it's important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly. To understand the properties you're working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.
I always like when you start to use something with a little less reverence. You start to use it a little carelessly, and with a little less thought, because then, I think, you're using it very naturally.
That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.
We won't do something different for different's sake. Designers cave in to marketing, to the corporate agenda, which is sort of, 'Oh, it looks like the last one; can't we make it look different?' Well no, there's no reason to.
If you expect me to buy something where all I can sense is carelessness, actually I think that is personally offensive.
I'm always focussed on the actual work, and I think that's a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.
If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
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.
Different' and 'new' is relatively easy. Doing something that's genuinely better is very hard.
Make each product the best it can be. Focus on form and materials. What we don't include is as important as what we do include.
I feel that it's lovely when, as a user, you're not aware of the complexity.
I think a beautiful product that doesn't work very well is ugly.
When you're doing something for the first time, you don't know it's going to work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it's copied. I have to be honest: the first thing I can think, all those weekends that I could have at home with my family but didn't. I think it's theft, and it's lazy.
Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can't imagine any other way.
The thing with focus is that it's not this thing you aspire to, like, 'Oh, on Monday I'm going to be focused.' It's every single minute: 'Why are we talking about this when we're supposed to be talking about this?'
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.
If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to.
At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people.
A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.
I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.
There is a clear goal and it isn't to make money. The goal is to desperately try to make the best products we can. We are not naive - if you trust it, people like it, they buy it and we make money. This is a consequence.
Good is the enemy of great.
There are 9 rejected ideas for every idea that works.
People's interest is in the product, not in its authorship.
When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.
True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, 'Yeah, well, of course.' Where there's no rational alternative.
One thing most people don't know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer.
Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural - it's so hard!
Successful collaboration, in your mind, could be that your opinion is the most valuable and becomes the prevailing sort of direction. That's not collaborating.
There's no other product that changes function like the computer.
It never ceases to amaze me what it takes to develop and bring to mass production a product.
It's easy to think that craft can't change but important to remember that all craft process was at some point new, at some point challenged convention - not to be contrary, but enabled by some breakthrough, some newly discovered principle, or sometimes some wonderful accident.
We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable, that leave you with the sense that that's the only possible solution that makes sense.
There was a 'Wired' cover that had a big Apple logo with a crown of barbed wire as thorns, and underneath it just said, 'Pray.' I remember this because of how upsetting it was. Basically saying either it's going to just go out of business or be bought.
What I think is remarkable is the force of habit and the fact that while we can have a practice for doing something that has been repetitive and established over many, many years, it doesn't actually mean there's any virtue to doing it that way at all.
Manufactured objects testify to who made them; they describe values.
If doing anything new, you're very used to having insurmountable obstacles.
You learn a lot about vital corporations through non-vital corporations.
I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple's tell-tale white earbuds. But I'm constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?
I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making.
Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.
My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.
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.
It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.
As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on.
When you do everything to make the very best product, it also means you're very focused on just a few products.
The computer industry is creatively bankrupt.
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.