Jony Ive

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he came across a rumpled British designer working away at the company's headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of sketches and prototypes. That designer was Jony Ive. Their partnership went on to produce some of the most recognizable products of the era, among them the iMac, the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone.

This biography follows Ive from his beginnings as an English art school student with dyslexia to his standing as the most celebrated tech designer of his generation. His work helped pull Apple out of a long slump, reshaped whole industries and built a vast worldwide following. Even so, the public knows surprisingly little about the shy, soft-spoken designer whom Jobs called his "spiritual partner."

Leander Kahney draws on interviews with Ive's former colleagues and people from inside Apple to show how these objects came to be, and what kind of person stood behind them. The result is a close look at a quiet figure whose ideas continue to shape the devices people use every day.