In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. The “fiddle-factor” notion may have seemed trivial to some, but the incorporation of the ball and clip transformed the pen into something special.

A voracious reader, Jony’s tastes ran to books on design theory, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and nineteenth-century literature. A museum-goer, too, he and his dad had made many visits over the years to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one of the world’s leading art and design museums. He studied the work of Eileen Gray, one of the twentieth century’s most influential furniture designers and architects. Modern masters fascinated Jony, among them Michele De Lucchi, a member of Italy’s Memphis group, who tried to make high-tech objects easy to understand by making them gentle, humane and a bit friendly. Grinyer remembered Jony falling in love with furniture maker Jasper Morrison’s school of design, which was very architecturally pure, all straight lines with no curvaceous shapes. He was also fascinated by Dieter Rams, the legendary designer at Braun. “We were all inspired by Dieter Rams,” said Grinyer. “Rams’s design principles were implanted into us at design school—but we were not designing products that looked like Braun’s at Tangerine. Jony just liked the simplicity.”

Excerpted from Page 35 of Jony Ive – The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatness by Leander Kahney