SAN FRANCISCO: Chief Design Officer Jony Ive is leaving Apple. He is the man behind iconic designs of the iPhone, iMac and iPad. He is departing after more than two decades at Apple to start his own design firm, the company said Thursday.

Ive has been a fixture on Apple’s design team since the early 1990s and is known for shaping Apple’s signature rounded, stylish designs.

He is often pointed to as the visionary behind what set Apple apart from its competitors — technology that didn’t just look like boxes of wires, but that was fashionable and trendy.

Ive joined the company in 1992 as a young senior designer. Apple’s co-founder and longtime leader Steve Jobs was in the midst of his 12-year exile at the time, and upon his return he named Ive senior vice president of industrial design.

The pair were known to work closely together in the decades before Jobs’ death in 2011 — once, Jobs referred to Ive as his “spiritual partner.”

Walter Isaacson, who wrote the 2011 biography “Steve Jobs,” quotes the Jobs describing Ive as “wickedly intelligent in all ways.”

“He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He is not just a designer,” Jobs told Isaacson. “He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.”

“I so identified with that motivation and was moved by his description,” Ive said.

“Simplicity isn’t just a visual style,” Ive told Isaacson. “It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.” (Agencies)