Wallpaper Interview With Jony Ive on ‘Designed by Apple in California’

Jony Ive:

The biggest challenge for us was the fact that our focus and preoccupation is always on the future. So that tends to exclude much time to look back at the work we have previously done. Sometimes if we are struggling with a particular issue then that gives us reason to go back and look at the way we have solved problems in the past. But because we’ve been so consumed by our current and future work we came to realise we didn’t have a catalogue of the physical products. So about eight years ago we felt an obligation to address this and build an objective archive. Many of the products that you see, we actually had to go out and purchase [laughs]. It’s a rather shameful admission, but it’s just not an area that we really invested much time or energy in, so we started to build an archive of the physical products. […]

Interestingly, the only way we realised we would finish the project was to treat it like one of the projects in the studio. There were a few things we needed to do to accurately and objectively portray these products. Of course, many of these products are white, so the off-the-shelf printing processes really didn’t do an adequate job in describing the colour and surface of those products. So, unsurprisingly we ended up developing custom forms of paper [from British papermaker James Cropper] and custom inks.

It really does look like a marvelous book. Wallpaper has a short video with a behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s design team at work, and it also shows some pages from the book. I absolutely love that they include this well-worn original iPhone.

★ Tuesday, 15 November 2016