Jony Ive

From the mid-1990s he led Apple's industrial design team and, working closely with Steve Jobs, developed the 1998 iMac, a colourful translucent desktop computer that sold more than 2 million units in its first year; the Design Museum says it brought colour and light to computing, and Britannica says his work helped make design as central to a personal computer's appeal as its technical performance.

His team went on to design the iPod (2001), the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010) and the MacBook; the Royal Academy of Engineering gave him its 2005 President's Medal for his design of the iPod, and in 2003 the Design Museum named him the first winner of its Designer of the Year award.

After Steve Jobs's death in 2011 his remit widened: he began the Apple Watch, launched in 2015, took charge of Apple's software design (Human Interface) as well as hardware in 2012, overseeing the iOS 7 redesign, and worked with Foster + Partners on the Apple Park campus.

During the Apple Watch's development the software and interface teams held weekly reviews of the sound and feel of events such as an incoming call; Wired reports that Ive was the decider and was hard to please, rejecting versions as too metallic or not organic enough, and that it took more than a year to reach sounds and taps he was happy with.

This is consistent with an exacting standard for sensory detail. Perfectionism

By the end of 2011 prototypes of the future iPhone 6 were lined up in the studio at every tenth of an inch of screen size, from four inches to well over six. The New Yorker reports that Ive and his colleagues judged each by carrying it around for days: a 5.7-inch model that first felt right seemed too big after sleeping on it, and Tim Cook said the final sizes were not plucked from nowhere.

This illustrates a habit of testing design judgments against physical prototypes over several days rather than trusting a first impression. Experimentation

By the mid-1990s Ive was close to leaving Apple, according to a former London colleague, and the New Yorker reports that he had a resignation letter in his pocket when Steve Jobs returned as chief executive in 1997. Jobs visited the design studio, and Ive says they began working together that day on what became the iMac, which launched in the summer of 1998, about two and a half years after Ive took charge of the group.

This is consistent with staying committed through a stretch when his work was undervalued, then working in close partnership once the company's priorities changed. Persistence