The design guru who became famous during the Steve Jobs era has left the company. What do insiders think of him?

Last week, Apple's Chief Design Officer Jony Ive announced his resignation, causing consternation among those familiar with Apple. What do Apple insiders think of this famous design master who became famous during the Jobs era? The business magazine Fast Company interviewed colleagues who had worked with him and asked them to talk about their previous work experience with Jony Ive in the first person.

The three former Apple employees are Don Norman, Ken Kocienda and Imran Chaudhri, who have worked with Ive at different times, and their stories can help the outside world understand the career of the most famous designer of the past three decades from more perspectives.

Apple's beacon of light during this period of confusion

—Don Norman, Director of the University of California Design Lab and former Senior Vice President of Technology at Apple

Jonathan Ive is a brilliant industrial designer. I worked with him many years ago when I was at Apple. This was a time when Apple was completely lost. Jonathan was incredibly talented, but at the time, Apple's structure didn't allow for that talent to be utilized.

I remember one day he came to me with a new design for a desktop computer that was not only beautiful but also much easier to access than our existing computers, such as the motherboard. However, he couldn’t get anyone else to incorporate this design into Apple’s product line. He and I talked to a lot of product managers and VPs, and they all raised objections, and Jonathan talked about the solution to each objection. We talked all the way up the management chain and finally to the CEO, and we won. But I still didn’t understand why we needed to do this. It took me 30 seconds to realize this: Apple was a mess at that time.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he did a cleanup. He replaced all the executives with people from his own company, Next Computer. I was one of those people who got fired. I was a vice president at Apple, which meant you were out. I don’t blame Jobs. Apple was having real problems, and starting over wasn’t a bad idea. But when Jobs saw the work Jonathan was doing on the design team, the work that was dying in the warehouse, he immediately saw the spark and the potential. Jonathan was always brilliant and creative. And Jobs turned that into one of Apple’s greatest assets. The rest is history.

An Imperfect Chief Design Officer

—Ken Kozenda, author of Creative Selection: The Design Process Inside Apple During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, former chief engineer of Apple’s iPhone software

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive sounded the death knell for the old beige computer. Jobs provided the drive and inspiration, while Ive built and led the design team. Together, they showed everyone how high-tech products could be both beautiful and useful. Ive became famous and renowned for making products better in our lives.

But as Apple's chief design officer, Ive was far less successful. When he took over software design, I felt he just treated it as a branch of industrial design. Sure, Ive had great taste, but software was another discipline. To use an analogy: an orthopedic surgeon could also perform coronary artery bypass surgery on you in an emergency if there was an experienced team around him, but would you be willing to be the patient? For many years, Apple has been such a software design chief.

In 2013, I demonstrated software to Jonathan for the first time. He wanted to see the user interface animations run at different speeds. I connected my laptop to the iPhone on the table for the demonstration (Sina Digital Note: about computer + mobile phone working together), which surprised Ive. He said that it might take days or weeks for industrial design to make such adjustments. I was also surprised. I had always coded so quickly. I thought to myself, Jonathan has no idea how we work in the software industry. Rapid iteration is the key to shaping software and making it more perfect, and more leadership is needed to guide the process. Over time, I am sure that Ive can adapt to software design, but he never does.

A firm pursuit of aesthetics

—Imran Chaudhry, co-founder of Humane and former design director of Apple’s Human Interface Division

Ive's greatest design legacy goes beyond form and surface, and is undoubtedly his relentless pursuit of beauty. Few people in our industry care about every aspect and every detail of aesthetics like he does.

Designing for computers and devices is a complex art. It's a field that is a complex fusion of hardware and software, and few people respect this fusion of hardware and software as much as Jobs did. He knew that creating the perfect interaction of the physical and the digital would lead to the best experience.

Jobs saw himself as a composer and liked to keep the two disciplines separate. Jony’s advantage was that he understood that Jobs wanted the device itself to convey beauty both when it was dormant and when it was in use, allowing us to truly understand the beautiful magic of software.

Jonathan understood the value of collaboration, and even though Jobs kept us separate (Sina Digital Note: This may be due to Apple's strict culture of confidentiality), we would still secretly share what we were working on. The first time I shared the iPhone software with the rest of the design team was in the Apple parking lot, under the cover of my car trunk.

Like the greatest symphonies, it’s always complex, sometimes risky, but always beautiful. Apple’s music and composers have changed, and those who truly understand the aesthetic still need to move on, including Ive himself.