The Design Revolution: 1983-85
Part 1 - frogdesign
4-frogdesign || 5-Corporate focus || Conclusion || Bibliography & links
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Superficially, Apple continued to show Jobs' influence. Jobs had long felt that good physical design was essential to generate a relationship with a consumer. Out of a concern for what he often called "elegance" and "taste," Jobs guided the packaging, manual, and advertising for Apple products. The carton for the original Macintosh had the keyboard, mouse, disks, cords, manual, and the computer itself each in separate compartments, forcing a ritual that familiarized the user with the equipment. These cartons typified Jobs' sense of elegance: the white cardboard had a black-and-white photograph of the Macintosh and was sparsely labeled in the Garamond Condensed typeface which Apple still uses. Apple's printed advertisements have a similar, uncluttered look with accessible text in thin columns typically around a photograph of smiling people and a Mac (e.g. Apple ad in Byte, June 1985, p. 0-1). As with IBM's Little Tramp ads, other companies emulated Apple's own marketing, but with a style rather than allusions to a character. Apple-related products were frequently advertised with similar thin columns of text on a white background, an image of a Mac and often Apple's own logo.
The notable exception to Apple's simple elegance is the initial television ad for the Macintosh, played only twice - at one a.m. on December 15 1983 on an obscure Twin Falls, Idaho station merely to qualify for the 1984 advertising awards (it won at least 35 for its creators at Chiat/Day, including the Grand Prix at Cannes); and at the January 22 Super Bowl, beginning a tradition of expensive Super Bowl-specific commercials (MacWorld, May/June 1984, p. 26). However, even this ad expresses Apple's elegant simplicity through a negative argument: in it, a woman dressed in a Macintosh t-shirt and running shorts runs, chased by stormtroopers, through a dystopian industrial world and throws a hammer into the screen from which a Big Brother figure preaches "uniformity of thought" to passionless workers. The screen explodes, the workers look stunned in the white light that emerges, and a simple message appears to declare that with the introduction of Macintosh "you will see why 1984 won't be like '1984'" (Levy, 169-70). This 60 second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott shortly after Bladerunner, cost over half a million dollars to make and even more for the Super Bowl time slot, but eventually was seen by over 43 million people through its controversial discussion on news programs (Sculley, 170-8). The commercial was controversial but generally understood: the Macintosh offered freedom from the impersonal slavishness of the IBM PC standard.
The importance that Jobs put on appearance is most vividly seen in Apple's use of industrial design, and the computers developed even after Jobs' departure express his influence. The style used for Apple's advertising and packaging remained relatively constant to reinforce the visual identity of their technology and suggest its most obvious differentiating characteristic, elegant simplicity. The adherence to Jobs' plan for industrial design, however, had additional economic motivations: Jobs had already purchased a distinct design language in a consulting contract of unprecedented expense (Kunkel, 37).
In March of 1982, Jobs met with the Apple Design Guild, an informal and somewhat disparate group of in-house industrial designers, and told them that he would begin the search for a "world-class" designer to give Apple a uniform design language. On Jerry Manock's suggestion, the search took the form of a contest in which each finalist presented designs for seven concept products, named after Snow White's dwarves. Initial candidates were literally chosen from the pages of industrial design magazines. After a year selecting finalists, Terry Oyama, as an in-house representative, and the established British design house B.I.B. both presented ideas for the Snow White language, but Apple's executives whole-heartedly chose a lesser-known German designer, Hartmut Esslinger. In late spring, 1983, Esslinger moved to California to form frogdesign, Inc., signing a contract with Apple to exchange exclusive services for $100 000 per month, plus billable time and expenses (Kunkel, 28-37).
Frogdesign's Snow White language would transform the appearance of Apple's products and gain attention through numerous design awards. The relationship between Apple and frogdesign gained enough publicity that in December of 1985, Apple could make an unglossed allusion to their design language in an advertisement for the new Apple CreditCard offering "Snow White and dwarf monthly payments" (Apple ad in Byte, Dec. 1985, 4 pages inserted between p. 32 and 33). This relationship was actually between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger; Esslinger was known for reporting only to top executives, and he had a particularly close rapport with Jobs, who shared both his taste and his uncompromising ambition to make this taste manifest through design (Kunkel, 28-36). After the departure of Jobs in September 1985, Apple tried unsuccessfully to renegotiate its contract with frogdesign, then began requesting less work. His income reduced to the monthly retainer - which Apple became slow in paying - Esslinger finally broke his exclusive contract in 1987 to work again for Jobs, designing products for NeXT Computer (Kunkel, 58-63).
To the Snow White
design language
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