Jony Ive became the world's most influential designer at Apple, says Owen Hopkins. His revolutionary products rescued the company from its decline and have ensured his legacy.

According to Apple there are currently something in the region of 1.4 billion active users of its devices. There's a good chance that you are reading this article on one of them. Given how ubiquitous they have become it is quite staggering to think that the design of every single one of those devices was overseen by Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer, who has just announced he is leaving the company to set up his own firm.
Moving from the UK, Ive joined Apple in 1992 ? seven years after Steve Jobs departed the company he founded and five years before his return as CEO in 1997. Apple was already sliding into the trouble it would find itself in during the mid-1990s, but didn't realise it yet. Ive was involved with the design of a several innovative though ultimately ill-fated products of that era, notably the various iterations of the Newton MessagePad and the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. But as Apple increasingly flailed around, these products never lived up to their striking designs. Jobs' return brought discipline back to the company. He cancelled a number of product lines he felt weren't up to it or were distractions, including the Newton, and reduced Apple's overly complex range of Macs to a 4x4 grid: desktop and portable, consumer and professional. But something wholly new was needed to get customers...