Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

I wished to get a stronger sense of understanding of Jony’s takes on design. But that I mostly got in the first chapters. The rest felt like product timelines.

An interesting read. The author being a journalist, does a very good work in gathering and putting together all the relevant known information about Jony Yve, life and achievements. However because being a journalist, he lacks knowledge and expertise do go in depth, reading and interpreting data, to understand what all this means for Design, Industrial Design and Interaction Design. Even if the author tries to present the work as groundbreaking, he is just following second-hand opinions. For me, the most relevant thing I learned from it was that Yve was solely responsible for the industrial design of the iPhone and iPad, he never touched its Interaction neither Interface Design, which was as, if not more, relevant for its global acceptance. This was managed by Jobs and the software team. Also, and this is not directly said in the book, just hinted, Yve never agreed with Jobs conception of Interface Design, but he never challenged him, he awaited for him to die, to take charge and change the metaphor language used by Apple human interfaces, transforming it into the Flat design approach since iOS 7. The worst part of the book is that in searching to elevate the qualities of Jony Yve as designer, the author elevates him to the category of a Messiah, forgetting that everything Jony achieved, was made collaboratively. In defence of Jony, we must acknowledge that this is an unauthorised biography. In the end it's suggested Jony Yve is even better for Apple than Steve Jobs could ever be. Even if I can agree that Yves has a better range of design skills than Jobs, I doubt he has the same ability to read society mind, and comprehend its desires and ambitions, but future will tell. 3.5/5

The only reason I finished this book was because I am a designer and I thought I might learn something. And I have, props to the book for doing that. The content is at points very inspiring. At other points, however, it is very repetitive, with a lot of 'this person said' and 'that person said', as well as a lot of details and anecdotes that are actually not that exciting. But what annoyed me the most was how badly designed this book had been. While not 'a design book', this book is about design, and yet there are no design sketches in it. Not a single one. There is, right in the middle of the book, a brief collection of small and grainy black-and-white photos, a mixture of portraits, candid shots, product imagery and photos of prototypes, to which the book makes occasional references, but that was it. Not useful. Instead, I would have LOVED to see a progression of sketches and prototypes of each of the products that the text describes in detail, iteration by iteration. And the reader has to either imagine it all, recall from experience or - as I did - just freaking Google it. I found some articles on the internet that - for free - shed a much a clearer light on the products that Jony Ive and his team designed, so the content is out there for people to find and look at. Why it has not been included in the book escapes me.

Even though I respect Ive, I felt this biography only hit skin deep. It went over all the major events in his life, his passion for design, awards he achieved -- but that's really it. I don't feel I know him anymore than before reading this.