Sir Jony Ive, Chief Design Officer of Apple has announced that he will be stepping down from his role at the Silicon Valley tech giant. Ive helped to transform Apple into the world’s most valuable company but has now decided to leave to start his own venture.

Some of Ive’s greatest achievements at Apple since leading the design team in 1996 include everything from numerous design awards for the iPod, iPad, iPhone and was also responsible for the entire look and feel of the way Apple was designed. Ive oversaw Apple hardware, the user interfaces, major architectural products that apple designed such as their retain stores and also down to the packaging of Apple’s products. It was the steer of one man that helped to guide such a synonymous, high quality offering by a company known mainly for their intensity on design innovation and being at the forefront of benchmarks in this field.

Whether you like the tech giant or not, there really is not disputing the design standards that were set by an almost futuristic look at how to develop products and software. Apple became the “gold standard”; a question among all design and development teams always was “how can we become like apple?” or “how would Apple design this” – and this was a testament to Jony directly; replace “Apple” with his name.

Sir Jonathan will be leaving later his year to start a creative firm, LoveFrom, with Apple as its first client. “This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change,” he said. Apple boss Tim Cook said his “role in Apple’s revival cannot be overstated”.

Jony holds well over 5,000 patents alongside the numerous design awards that he won, including the Design Museum London’s first Designer of the Year in 2003, the Design and Art Direction (D&AD) President’s Award in 2005 and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Product Design Award in 2007. Jony and his team were also named Best Design Studio of the past 50 years by D&AD, with their work featuring in collections of museums around the world. This includes the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou in Paris.

Jony will perhaps be best known for the smooth talking, precise narration on Apple product release videos. The likes of which you can see below:

 

“He had a ferocious intensity about him,” Rick English, a photographer at Apple during the period, told biographer Leander Kahney. “He led in a quiet way. He inspired people to work for him.”

Jony also described one of the most recent Apple products explaining that “the best ideas can actually come from the quietest voices” – a statement in which people believe Ive was reflecting on his own career as a designer.

Here is Jony again on the release of the iPhone XS and iPhone XR:

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