Apple design chief Jony Ive isn’t retiring–not even completely from Apple. He’s starting his own design firm, called LoveFrom, and Apple will be the new firm’s first client.
LoveFrom? Sort of an odd name on first hearing, right? Well, there’s a story there. The name comes from this Steve Jobs quote, paraphrased by Ives in a Financial Times piece today.
“I so identified with that motivation and was moved by his description. So my new company is called ‘LoveFrom’. It succinctly speaks to why I do what I do.”
Ive is considered the main torchbearer of the Apple design aesthetic and vision in the years after Steve Jobs’s death.
He was relieved of daily management of the vaunted Industrial Design group in 2015 when he assumed the title of chief design officer—and helped create the company’s new “spaceship” Apple Park headquarters—but then reassumed management responsibilities again in 2017. LoveFrom’s cofounder, Marc Newson, is an Australian designer who arrived at Apple in 2014 shortly before the announcement of the Apple Watch.
Since taking control of the Apple design team in 1996, Ive designed or codesigned pretty much every major Apple hardware product including the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. He’s said to hold more than 5,000 patents.