Apple's Design Cult...and Pizza

A neat Business Week story on Jonathan Ive, the man behind Apple’s great designs. An excerpt:

Ive says he and his boss speak at least once a day. In fact, their lives are very much part of the same fabric. Despite great fame and fortune, both manage to guard their privacy. Ive lives with his wife, a historian he knew growing up, and their young twins in a house "with not a hint of ostentation," says Clive Grinyer, Ive's first business partner. Jobs, for all his self-promoting skills, lives a relatively quiet life as well. He owns no vacation houses and rarely shows up to Silicon Valley social and business events. The sneakers, the T-shirts, and Issey Miyake turtlenecks that he sports are not only for dramatic effect -- he likes the informal style, as do Ive and his team of designers.

But if Jobs is the public keeper of Apple's design zeitgeist, then Ive is the private leader of its talented design team. "Apple is a cult, and Apple's design team is an even more intense version of a cult," notes Riley. Actually, it's not a big cult -- just a dozen people or so. But they operate at an extremely high level, both individually and as a group. Ive has said that many Apple products were dreamed up while eating pizza in the small kitchen at the team's design studio.