Jony Ive has designed a ‘magically transforming’ Red Nose

Former head Apple designer Jony Ive has taken on an unusual brief: designing the iconic Red Nose that symbolizes the British charity Comic Relief. The new Red Nose is made mostly from plant-based materials and transforms from a small flat crescent into a honeycomb-paper sphere. Comic Relief says Ive’s redesigned Red Nose is the “most dramatic makeover since its debut in 1988.”

The product is being sold as part of Red Nose Day, an annual charity fundraising event from Comic Relief that’s broadcast across a variety of British BBC TV channels.

“We’ve grown up with Comic Relief and are proud to support their remarkable work,” says Jony Ive. “This new and seemingly simple Red Nose has been a fabulously complex little object to design and make and has involved our entire team. We hope it brings a little moment of joy to everyone who wears one.”

Much like a pair of AirPods that Jony Ive helped design, this year’s Red Nose even ships in a little case that you can store it in when it’s flat. The design is shown off in a Red Nose Day video above, where you can see the Red Nose fold out to fit a variety of nose shapes.

Comic Relief has started selling the new Red Nose today for £2.50 (around $3), and is limiting online orders to eight per person ahead of Red Nose Day on March 17th. This new Red Nose will also be available on Amazon for the first time, which Comic Relief describes as “the new home of the Red Nose.” The British public helped raise more than £42 million (around $51 million) last year, taking Comic Relief fundraising past a milestone of £1.5 billion raised since the charity began in 1985.

This is one of the first products from Jony Ive that the public can buy since the British born designer left Apple in 2019 after nearly 30 years. Ive and famed designer Marc Newson teamed up to start LoveFrom, a new design firm that has collaborated with Airbnb, Ferrari, and now Comic Relief. Ive left behind a rich body of work when he stepped down as Apple’s head product designer, including the colorful iMac G3 in 1998, the iPod in 2001, and of course the iPhone in 2007.