Jony Ive spent nearly three decades shaping objects most of the world now touches every day. Born in Chingford, London, in 1967 to a silversmith father, he studied industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic and started his career at the London agency Tangerine, designing products for clients like LG before Apple recruited him in 1992.
He rose to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in 1997 and later Chief Design Officer, leading the teams behind the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and the interface design of iOS. Those products didn’t just sell in the hundreds of millions, they set the visual language other tech companies spent two decades imitating. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2012 for his contribution to design.
Ive left Apple in 2019 after 27 years, ending a formal consulting arrangement with the company in 2022. He co-founded the design studio LoveFrom with longtime collaborator Marc Newson, taking on clients including Airbnb, Moncler, and the British Museum, and designing King Charles III’s coronation emblem.
In 2024, Ive started a hardware company called io with former Apple colleagues. OpenAI acquired it for 6.5 billion dollars in 2025, and Ive now oversees design and creative direction across OpenAI’s operations, working alongside Sam Altman on the company’s push into physical AI devices.
Most recently, LoveFrom designed the interior of the Ferrari Luce, the brand’s first electric car, unveiled in 2026. Ive worked directly with Ferrari’s chief design officer Flavio Manzoni on details down to a steering wheel machined from 19 recycled aluminum parts. “Everything is founded on being functional,” Ive said of the project. “It’s not styled, it’s not garnish, because that’s a distraction.”
He remains one of the few designers whose name alone signals a certain kind of restraint, one part of his industry has spent years trying to copy and rarely matches.
