The way in which we communicate the essence of our ideas dictates how they will be absorbed and ultimately formed.

Ideas are immaterial things that hold immense weight, and being of the imagined kind, they require a skilled delivery system to retain their true dreamlike power as they travel out of the consciousness of their creator and into the minds of collaborators, and ultimately, audiences.

This is a yo-yo process of idea changing state, from abstraction to form to abstraction and back and forth and back forth until a final product manifests.

Sir Jony Ive is a perfect example of a voice that was made to explain concepts. As a child, I’d watch his presentations about titanium alloys and glossy matte finishes on the Apple website every time a new device was launched. I neither understood nor really cared about the specs of the products, and yet, I’d always be hypnotised into hearing every single technical decision his team made.

At times, I do recall wondering if Ive was just a paid actor hired by Apple to embody their core design principles, with his beautifully bald head representing their renowned sleek minimalism and his resonant British accent offering an imperceivable sense of distinguished elegance. I guess I figured, if Apple were to design a human being, Jony Ive would probably be it.

But maybe this is just a similar phenomenon to when owners start to look like their dogs. I don’t know.

It does seem kind of ridiculous to only focus on the voice of a man who, alongside his best friend and boss, Steve Jobs, redesigned the way the world works, and is now doing so again with his work at Open AI. But I think in the arena of sharing ideas, Ive’s can showcase how the voice is an essential factor that deserves specific focus, for in the realm of artful ideas, it’s all about voice.

Our voice is a powerful tool in delivering not only information, but also subtextual tone, context, colour, personality. When we use our voice to explain our ideas we expose others to our passion for the idea, and that passion is nearly always infectious.

A voice is like an audible fingerprint. It brands our soul onto the ideas as they escape our mind.

If you have an idea you need to explain, some abstract notion, try start with the voice. Forget visual aids, presentation slides, metrics. First, see how it sounds when you say it aloud. Learn to hear your idea in your own voice. Do this to a mirror or to a friend. Write it down and read to yourself. And don’t give up if it’s hard to explain, even to yourself. Don’t be alarmed if you think your voice or the words you seem to choose make your idea sound worse than how you imagine it. This is what is supposed to happen when we try and translate concepts from brain space into the physical world.

For instance, it’s hard to describe a person when they are first born. We must wait, as nurturing will provide it with the guidance to grow, and time will reveal its true character.

It’s a refining practice cultivated over time. And with each new idea, the process begins all over again. Now, how the fuck do I explain this one?

This is the challenge. But when it is faced with a firm grasp on our voice, the time it takes to find an explanation reduces, and the confidence we embed into our words allows us the power to move onto more and more complex ideas.

Remember, voice is what gives our ideas, and therefore our art, a scent of us. The voice is what will resonate with people beyond surface-level comprehension. The voice is our point of view. Or better yet, the voice is just the point.