AA tribute to Jonathan Ive

~ 19 April 2004 ~

Jonathan Ive interface

Jonathan, meet Colin Bennett. Colin, Jonathan Ive.

Perhaps that’s an acquaintance that needs to be arranged. But first things first: I’m certain many of you may not know who Jonathan Ive is, much less Colin Bennett.

So allow me to make a few introductions. Jonathan Ive is the industrial design genius behind Apple and such ground-breaking product designs as the iMac, the PowerBook, and the iPod. At 37 and with no signs of slowing down, Ive was handed Design Museum’s prestigious Designer of the Year award in 2003.

Colin Bennett is a third-year graphic design student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland. Primarily a print designer, Colin proves he has the talent to go beyond the printed page with his Flash/3D tribute to Jonathan Ive.

I featured Colin’s tribute in Premium Linkage a couple of months ago, but the interface and related movement is so impressive that it’s worth featuring again. This time around, however, I contacted Colin to inquire about the piece.

“It’s been almost a year since I did that piece and it’s still amazing me how many emails I get regarding it,” Colin explains. “The interface was done as part of an art school project where we were given a lucky-dip box of designers and asked to construct a multimedia piece based on the style and philosophies of the designer we picked. I was really lucky to pull Jonathan Ive out of the pot.”

That must be why they call it a “lucky-dip box” (grab bag?) in Scotland, eh?

Anyhow, here’s how Colin constructed the unique interface and fluid movement:

“I designed the layout in FreeHand 9 (I was on OS9 at the time) and ensured all the type was converted to paths and lines stroked etc. Exported it as a flat vector EPS file and simply imported it into LightWave 3D 7.5c.

“After a lot of tweaking in LightWave, having never used LightWave in my life, I simply set-up a camera and animated it through various sweeps around the interface.

“I then rendered this all through the Swift3D LW 1.0 plug-in, again on OS9 in LightWave and simply imported the vector renders into Flash MX and linked it all together turning various bits of the render into buttons.”

Despite a large file size that perhaps could be better optimized, Colin Bennett’s tribute to Jonathan Ive is simply inspiring.

Jonathan, meet Colin Bennett.

 

3  Comments

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1   swimp ~ 22 April 2004 at 01:47 PM

I agree, the Jonathan Ive tribute is simply marvelous.


2   Chuitian Huang ~ 27 April 2004 at 09:22 PM

Janathan Ive, I like your design, and I hope you could see the message.

It is very hard to contact you, but I do have something important and I want to tell you directly. It is about design a future notebook.

My name is Chuitian Huang, an oversea student from China, and now I studing in Toronto, Canada. My interest in THINK. I think everything, most of my idea are about design. There is a notebook idea, I think it will be marvelous.

Is there anyway that I can talk to you directly? I think you are the one can make the idea to a design, and APPLE is the one can make the design become to a product.

Thanks your time for reading this message. please contack me at DoNotLetMeDie@msn.com.


3   Michael ~ 17 June 2004 at 02:14 AM

My heart shipped a beat when I read the passage “Colin Bennett is a third-year graphic design student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland.”

You see, I was at University of Abertay in Dundee for two years, having visited Duncan many times (in particular to peruse their superb library!). Colin, it was a good bet to go to Duncan rather than Abertay, trust me on that :)




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