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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?

-Jonathan Ive

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I Get An Incredible

Jonathan Ive

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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?

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We Don't Do Focus Groups - That Is The Job Of The Designer. It's Unfair To Ask People Who Don't Have A Sense Of The Opportunities Of Tomorrow From The Context Of Today To Design.

There Are A Thousand No's For Every Yes.

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We Shouldn't Be Afraid To Fail - If We Are Not Failing We Are Not Pushing. 80% Of The Stuff In The Studio Is Not Going To Work. If Something Is Not Good Enough, Stop Doing It.

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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.

That's An Interesting Thing About An Object. One Object Speaks Volumes About The Company That Produced It And Its Values And Priorities.

Really Great Design Is Hard. Good Is The Enemy Of Great.

Very Often Design Is The Most Immediate Way Of Defining What Products Become In People's Minds.

Apple's Jony Ive Describes His "fanatical" Approach To Design In New Interview

The Quest For Simplicity Has To Pervade Every Part Of The Process. It Really Is Fundamental.

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.

To Design Something Really New And Innovative You Have To Reject Reason.

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 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.

Precious Things

The Best Ideas Start As Conversations.

Designing And Developing Anything Of Consequence Is Incredibly Challenging.

Apple Stood For Something And Had A Reason For Being That Wasn't Just About Making Money.

Design Is A Word That's Come To Mean So Much That It's Also A Word That Has Come To Mean Nothing.

Its Difficult To Do Something Radically New, Unless You Are At The Heart Of A Company.

The Memory Of How We Work Will Endure Beyond The Products Of Our Work.

If You're Not Trying To Do Something Better, Then You're Not Focused On The Customer And You'll Miss The Possibility Of Making Your Business Great.

There's No Learning Without Trying Lots Of Ideas And Failing Lots Of Times.

I Discovered At An Early Age That All I've Ever Wanted To Do Is Design.

There Is Beauty When Something Works And It Works Intuitively.

A Beautiful Product That Doesn't Work Very Well Is Ugly.

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.

Titles Or Organizational Structures, That’s Not The Lens Through Which We See Our Peers.

We Are Really Pleased With Our Revenues But Our Goal Isn't To Make Money. It Sounds A Little Flippant, But It's The Truth. Our Goal And What Makes Us Excited Is To Make Great Products. If We Are Successful People Will Like Them And If We Are Operationally Competent, We Will Make Money.

What We Don't Include Is As Important As What We Do Include.

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.

There Are 9 Rejected Ideas For Every Idea That Works.

The More I Learnt About This Cheeky - Almost Rebellious - Company, The More It Appealed To Me, As It Unapologetically Pointed To An Alternative In A Complacent And Creatively Bankrupt Industry. Apple Stood For Something And Had Reason For Being That Wasn't Just About Making Money.

Different And New Is Relatively Easy. Doing Something Thats Genuinely Better Is Very Hard.

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.

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’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.

It's Very Easy To Make Something That Is New. So We Are Trying To Make Things That Are Better.

We Have Always Thought About Design As Being So Much More Than Just The Way Something Looks. It's The Whole Thing: The Way Something Works On So Many Different Levels. Ultimately, Of Course, Design Defines So Much Of Our Experience.

We Say No To A Lot Of Things So We Can Invest An Incredible Amount Of Care On What We Do.

It Feels Like Each Time We Are Beginning At The Beginning, In A Really Exciting Way.

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.

Simplicity Is Somehow Essentially Describing The Purpose And Place Of An Object And Product.

And I Said Couldn't We Be More Moderate? And He Said Why? And I Said Because I Care About The Team. And He Said, 'no Jony, You're Just Really Vain. You Just Want People To Like You. I'm Surprised At You, Because I Thought You Really Held The Work Up As The Most Important And Not How You Are Perceived By People.' People Misunderstand Steve Because He Was So Focused.

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We Try To Solve Very Complicated Problems Without Letting People Know How Complicated The Problem Was.

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Making The Solution Seem So Completely Inevitable And Obvious, So Uncontrived And Natural - It's So Hard!

It's Very Easy To Be Different, But Very Difficult To Be Better.

Difficult And Easy

We Don't Do Focus Groups - That Is The Job Of The Designer.

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.

A Small Change At The Beginning Of The Design Process Defines An Entirely Different Product At The End.

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It Became An Exercise To Reduce And Reduce, But It Makes It Easier To Build An Easier For People To Work With.

The Nature Of Having Ideas And Creativity Is Incredibly Inspiring.

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?

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The Word Design Is Everything And Nothing. The Design And The Product Itself Are Inseparable.

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To Do Something Innovative Means That You Reject Reason.

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The Best Design Explicitly Acknowledges That You Cannot Disconnect The Form From The Material - The Material Informs The Form.

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Simplicity Is Not The Absence Of Clutter.

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A Lot Of What We Are Doing Is Getting Design Out Of The Way.

The Computer Industry Is Creatively Bankrupt.

People's Interest Is In The Product, Not In Its Authorship.

Objects And Their Manufacture Are Inseparable, You Understand A Product If You Understand How It's Made.

It's Just Easier To Talk About Product Attributes That You Can Measure With A Number. Focus On Price, Screen Size, That's Easy. But There's A More Difficult Path, And That's To Make Better Products, Ones Where Maybe You Can't Measure Their Value Empirically.

Really Great Design Is Hard. Good Is The Enemy Of Great. Competent Design Is Not Too Much Of A Stretch. But If You Are Trying To Do Something New, You Have Challenges On So Many Axes.

But One Of The Things That Really Irritates Me In Products Is When I'm Aware Of Designers Wagging Their Tails In My Face.

I Think Subconsciously People Are Remarkably Discerning. I Think That They Can Sense Care.

I Left London In 1992, But I'm There 3-4 Times A Year, And Love Visiting.

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.

If Something Is Not Good Enough, Stop Doing It.

Not Good Enough

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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.

I Think There Is A Profound And Enduring Beauty In Simplicity; In Clarity, In Efficiency. True Simplicity Is Derived From So Much More Than Just The Absence Of Clutter And Ornamentation. It's About Bringing Order To Complexity.

The Design Process Is About Designing And Prototyping And Making. When You Separate Those, I Think The Final Result Suffers.

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.

We Shouldn't Be Afraid To Fail- If We Are Not Failing We Are Not Pushing.

The Most Important Thing Is That You Actually Care, That You Do Something To The Very Best Of Your Ability

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