Then, as now, Jony\u2019s aesthetic tended toward minimalism, in reaction perhaps to the mid-1980s tendencies for excess. That had been the height of the \u201cdesigner decade,\u201d when the splashy colors of Culture Club and Kajagoogoo represented good taste. According to Kunkel, Jony avoided styling his products to protect them from dating too quickly. \u201cIn an era of rapid change, Ive understood that style has a corrosive effect on design, making a product seem old before its time. By avoiding style, he found that his designs could not only achieve greater longevity, he could focus instead on the kind of authenticity in his work that all designers aspire to, but rarely achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jony was not alone. Grinyer, Darbyshire and Phillips were minimalists, too, as were a growing number of other design firms. There was a global wave of minimalism, adopted by Tangerine and picked up by other designers, among them Naoto Fukasawa in Japan and Sam Hecht, another Saint Martins graduate, who worked on a lot of design for \u201cno-brand, high-quality\u201d Muji, the consumer and household products manufacturer. \u201cIn the contemporary culture of the 1980s, there was the clich\u00e9 of the over-designed environment, where everything was a riot of color and form,\u201d explained Professor Alex Milton. \u201cIt was a visual overload. Objects shouted at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c[Jony] graduated in this period where there was a lot of over-design. Objects did not impart any of their owner\u2019s personality. They were brands. And so designers wanted to become cooler, calmer, more reflective, and return to a sense of functionalism and utilitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Darbyshire expressed Tangerine\u2019s basic thinking this way: \u201cWe were trying to make things genuinely better, giving thought to the visual quality, usability and market relevance of all that we designed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grinyer contrasted this approach to the work at other agencies, which tried to put their signature on their commissions. \u201cWhen I was with Bill Moggridge, I saw lots of really good designers who could only design a particular sort of office-based industrial product,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen they tried to apply their same aesthetic to more mass-market, everyday products, they really failed. They came up with oddly techno products. And that puzzled me. I thought that design should be able to speak in different languages according to each specific purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Advances in manufacturing technology allowed Jony and his colleagues to gently push the envelope. \u201cThe 1990s were a time when we were beginning to be able to decorate products,\u201d Grinyer said. \u201cTheir form could be more interesting. It was no longer just about cladding electronics and putting the button in the right place. We could bring in more shapes, exploit the fluidity offered by injection molding plastics. We could create things that were actually beautiful rather than simply functional.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again, this had a potential downside, which Grinyer witnessed firsthand working at IDEO. \u201cDesigners would often come up with merely a shape,\u201d he said. \u201cThey did not think about the different functionality of, say, a computer screen and a television. I thought that was a mistake. We did not want to make something that was merely a beautiful shape. We wanted our designs to fit into people\u2019s homes. And we were very much focused on the user interface of products.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For his part, Jony took an independent view: His priority seemed always to be the creation of objects that were beautiful rather than simply functional. He was constantly questioning how things should be. \u201cHe hated ugly, black and tacky electronics,\u201d recalled Grinyer. \u201cHe hated computers having names like ZX75 and numbers of megabytes. He hated technology as it was in the 1990s.\u201d At a time of big changes in design, Jony looked to find his own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n