PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
Official website apple.comAdvertisement
Apple is a technology company, but it has a place in design history because it made the form of objects, and of on-screen interfaces, an essential part of its products. Since 1977 it has had its own in-house industrial design group, which designs the look of everything it sells.
From the Apple II to Snow White
The company was founded in California in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. As early as 1977 Jobs entrusted Jerry Manock with the case of the Apple II, looking for inspiration in department-store appliances. In the early 1980s Apple held a competition to find a single formal language for all its products: it was won by Hartmut Esslinger and the German studio frog design, authors of the Snow White language, with its thin grooves and creamy white colour, introduced with the Apple IIc in 1984.
The Macintosh and Susan Kare
The 1984 Macintosh popularised the mouse-driven graphical interface. Its on-screen look was above all the work of the graphic designer Susan Kare, who between 1983 and 1986 designed the icons, such as the smiling Mac at start-up and the Command key symbol, and the first proportionally spaced digital typefaces, such as Chicago and Geneva. For Kare good icons should work like traffic signs: simple and recognisable. In 2015 MoMA acquired her sketchbooks.
Jony Ive
After Jobs returned in 1997, the design group came under the leadership of the Briton Jony Ive, who had joined Apple in 1992. The first major project was the iMac (1998), with its coloured, translucent plastic case, followed by the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook and Apple Watch: objects reduced to essentials, with few buttons and materials such as aluminium. Ive has often acknowledged his debt to Dieter Rams and Braun products, and Rams himself named Apple as one of the few companies designing according to his principles of good design. Ive left Apple in 2019 to found the studio LoveFrom with Marc Newson.
Sources
Advertisement
