Jonathan Ive promoted to Chief Design Officer as two new execs step in to lead design departments (Tim Cook memo)

Alan Dye, Jony Ive, and Richard Howarth

Apple’s Jony Ive has served as the company’s Senior Vice President of Design for several years now, but the Telegraph has revealed today that the executive was recently promoted to “Chief Design Officer” and has handed the reins of both the industrial and software design units at Apple over to two new leaders.

Richard Howarth will now be in charge of the company’s user interface design, which spans both desktop and mobile devices. Alan Dye will lead the industrial design division and focus on hardware design. Ive’s new role will still leave him in charge of the company’s hardware and software design teams overall, but allowing others to handle the day-to-day affairs of each design group will free him up for other tasks.

Among those other tasks, Ive says, is a focus on the design of Apple’s retail stores.

An email from CEO Tim Cook to Apple employees confirmed the change today and helped flesh out the details of Ive’s new position and those of his new design leaders.

Team,

I have exciting news to share with you today. I am happy to announce that Jony Ive is being promoted to the newly created position of Chief Design Officer at Apple.

Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5000 design and utility patents to his name. His new role is a reflection of the scope of work he has been doing at Apple for some time. Jony’s design responsibilities have expanded from hardware and, more recently, software UI to the look and feel of Apple retail stores, our new campus in Cupertino, product packaging and many other parts of our company.

Design is one of the most important ways we communicate with our customers, and our reputation for world-class design differentiates Apple from every other company in the world. As Chief Design Officer, Jony will remain responsible for all of our design, focusing entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives. On July 1, he will hand off his day-to-day managerial responsibilities of ID and UI to Richard Howarth, our new vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, our new vice president of User Interface Design.

Richard, Alan and Jony have been working together as colleagues and friends for many years. Richard has been a member of the Design team for two decades, and in that time he has been a key contributor to the design of each generation of iPhone, Mac, and practically every other Apple product. Alan started at Apple nine years ago on the Marcom team, and helped Jony build the UI team which collaborated with ID, Software Engineering and countless other groups on groundbreaking projects like iOS 7, iOS 8 and Apple Watch.

Please join me in congratulating these three exceptionally talented designers on their new roles at Apple.

Tim

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