Apple hasn’t found a new chief designer since John Ive left. How did it happen

Bloomberg published a long article about how Apple’s design department is now working and why the company still has not researched a new chief designer after the departure of Jony Ive in 2019.

Jony Ive was almost completely free from a good relationship with Steve Jobs. In 2012, he began developing industrial and software design for Apple, becoming the company’s chief designer. This caused a major controversy within the company, resulting in former chief interface designer Greg Krusty leaving Apple.

After Ive’s departure, Apple reverted to splitting the chief design position, with Evans Hankey in charge of hardware design and Alan Dye leading software design.

Evans Hankey and Alan Dye

Apple has been trying to revive Ive’s position for a long time, but has been unable to find the right person for a leadership position.

One reason for this is staff turnover. From 2000 to 2015, Apple’s design team was relatively stable. Since 2015, when the Apple Watch was launched, Ive has moved to part-time work at Apple, and employee turnover has increased.

In the same year, Danny Coster, a longtime associate of Quince, quit Apple. He moved to GoPro. Ive’s deputy Christopher Stringer left Apple and ended Syng, which makes hi-fi speakers.

At the beginning of 2019, Apple faced the scheme next to the added designersWith: Rick Sorkendorfer, Julian Hoenig, Mikl Silvanto and Daniel De Julius. In mid-2019, Apple announced that Ive was leaving the company to found his studio LoveFrom, partnering with Ferrari, Airbnb, Moncler and other brands.

Several other guest designers recently left Apple: Jody Akana, Joe Tan, Anthony Ashcroft, Andrea Williams, Jeremy Batayou, and Eugene Wang. The last four moved to LoveFrom.

In total, at least 15 senior designers from the Quince team have left Apple since 2015. Sources say that only a “small handful” of Quince-era designers remained.

The main reason for this change in structure is that autonomy, which is highly efficient, has been greatly reduced as the voice of the operations department has come to play an important role. This is done to strengthen the “focus on costs”, and not “only on the appearance and functions.”

The strength was that we were dealing with the incredible speed of rotation, which is made up of particles, and things that we could do quite unconventional for a large volume company. It was a special team. After Steve’s death, it was convenient – everything became much more complicated. There were more expected and outward signs.

Said anonymously one of the old Apple designers

There are three options for choosing a new lead designer, but all of them are problematic:

▪️ Assign one of the infected Quince group members
▪️ Empower Alan Dye, who is now only responsible for software design
▪️ On the designer side.

Evans Hankey, who holds the position of chief industrial designer, will leave Apple next year. She was sometimes referred to as the company’s chief designer, although she did not officially hold that position.

After construction, Quince Hankey took on a part of it always, because for a long time she was an engineer-manager, head of design and worked closely with him. But it wasn’t turned on long enough to control the through emission of the product. These cycles can last for many years. The look of the latest iPhones, iMacs and iPads was designed before Hankey took office.

Today, Apple has five of Quince’s veteran industrial designers, including Duncan Kerr, Bart Andre, Richard Howarth, Peter Russell-Clark, and Ben Shaffer.

Alan Dye, Jony Ive and Richard Howarth

From 2015 to 2017, Richard Howarth led the industrial design department, but found it difficult to manage a team of former colleagues. However, many people close to the design department feel that he meets professionally.

However, the question probably remains whether Howarth himself can stay at Apple. Howarth worked for the company for 26 years. It was second in duration to Bart Andre, who has been with Apple for over 30 years.

There are new talented designers at Apple, but management is unlikely to choose one of them.

Alan Dai could be the chief designer, investor and leader. But its appointment causes irritation among industrial designers.

Also an unsuccessful outcome would be a candidate from another company, such as Google or Microsoft. Such a move would have crossed the “death of the team”. [Bloomberg]