Apple Loses Another Top Designer, Extending Post-Jony Ive Exodus

(Bloomberg) — The exodus is now nearly complete for the Apple Inc. design group that worked under Jony Ive, a legendary team that helped the company pioneer music players, smartphones, tablets and smartwatches.

Duncan Kerr, one of Ive’s few remaining design colleagues at the company, has informed Apple that he’s leaving soon, according to people who asked not to be identified because the move isn’t public. Kerr joined the company in 1999 and was instrumental to developing several generations of the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

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A spokeswoman for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

With the departure, Ive’s team of about two dozen closely knit employees has been almost entirely dissolved. In the years following Ive’s own exit in 2019, top designers like Jody Akana, Joe Tan, Anthony Ashcroft, Andrea Williams, Jeremy Bataillou and Eugene Whang left. The outflow continued over the past year, with major players like Bart Andre, Colin Burns, Shota Aoyagi and Peter Russell-Clarke departing as well.

Evans Hankey, Ive’s successor as Apple’s head of industrial design, left Apple last year. Alan Dye, the company’s chief of interface design, remains in place, but his team has also lost several members in recent months. The last remaining industrial designers from the Ive era are Richard Howarth, Molly Anderson and Ben Shaffer.

A large portion of the team at Apple has left for LoveFrom, Ive’s new design company. The firm is working on projects with Airbnb Inc., Ferrari NV, Moncler SpA and other brands. Ive has remained out of the Apple spotlight in recent years but participated in a joint interview with Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Laurene Powell Jobs in 2022.

Over the past year and a half, Apple’s team of designers has reported directly to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. That has irked some of the artists and sculptors, who were used to working closely with a manager from the design world. The brain drain of Apple designers after Ive’s departure led to Apple being unable to replace Hankey directly, Bloomberg News reported at the time.

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