Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products

By Leander Kahney

This new biography offers a detailed portrait of Northumbria University graduate, Sir Jonathan Ive – Senior Vice-President of Design for Apple and the man behind some of the world’s most iconic products, including the iPhone, iMac, iPod and iPad.

Before you read on, we feel it’s our duty to point out that the weather in Newcastle isn’t always dreary!

The following extract is taken from Chapter 2: A British Design Education focusing on Jony’s time at Northumbria University.

Renowned for its beer (Newcastle Brown Ale), football team (Newcastle United) and horrible weather, Jony’s new home was a vibrant, industrial port city.

When he arrived at the city, Margaret Thatcher ran the country, and the mainstays of the city’s economy, shipbuilding and coal, were in decline.

Despite the rain and Mrs Thatcher, Newcastle had a reputation as a party town. Roughly a sixth of the city’s inhabitants were students and the city centre was home to many bars and nightclubs. In 1985, Jony’s first year in university, the British music scene was as lively as ever, especially in the North, where bands like

The Smiths and New Order gained national attention. Within a few years, the city’s nightclubs would be host to a rave scene, thumping to the dynamic electronic dance music that Jony came to love.

Now known as Northumbria University, Newcastle Polytechnic was (and still is) regarded as the top college in the United Kingdom for ID. These days, the design school has about 120 staff and admits about 1,600 students from more than 65 countries. The department, then and now, is housed in a tall building called Squires Building*.

‘It was a rather brutal big building but was a great place for creativity in general,’ said David Tonge. ‘It was shared with fine art, fashion and craft just over the corridor. This was before industrial design had become fashionable.’

Each floor of the building is dedicated to a different design discipline: ID [Industrial Design – now