and public relations agency in Palo Alto California called Regis McKenna. One day, the creative director tells Rob the agency has picked up a new client and he’s the guy to work on the account. The creative director suggests Janoff meets up with a couple of guys who are making something called a ‘home computer.’ The name of their company is Apple.
The first meeting Janoff attends proves to be memorable. As he puts it, “The head of the company was Steve Jobs. He was not your typical CEO. He had long stringy hair, wore jeans and came in wearing sandals. I first met Steve when he brought his prototype of the new computer to our office. This was the point in time I think he knew he needed a new logo for his new computer. His old logo was a line drawing of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.”
The brief he received from Jobs was wide open. Back in 1977 the future Head of Apple Inc didn’t really have an idea about the brand he was creating. “Really there was no brief. But the really funny thing was the only direction we got from Steve Jobs is: “don’t make it cute”. There were briefs on subsequent jobs. First there was the logo, then there was an introductory ad and a sales brochure. But it was pretty lose at that time.”
The design process started with Janoff going to the local store and buying a bag of apples. He put them in a bowl and drew them for a week or so and worked on simplifying the shape. Once he had developed something he liked he realised that it needed something extra. “The reason why I did the bite is kind of a let down. But I’ll tell you. I designed it with a bite for scale, so people would get that it was an apple not a cherry. Also it was kind of iconic about taking a bite out of an apple. Something that everyone can experience.”
Janoff’s final design was a simplified silhouette of an apple with multi colored stripes and a bite taken out of it. The contour of the bite matched the contour of the letter “a” of the name of the new computer, the Apple II.
Selling the idea proved more difficult than he expected. “Steve liked the idea, because he liked things that were outside the box. And, it’s not so revolutionary now, but it was a little different then. However I did get a lot of opposition from one of the higher account executives at agency. He was sort of working against me on the meeting where I presented the work to Steve. He made a comment that if this new company went ahead and produced stationary in all these colors they will go bankrupt before they started the business. That was kind of the attitude that I was facing from the agency. But Steve liked it right off. He’s a pretty perceptive guy as we later learned and he liked the uniqueness of it as well. Also, I should add that the idea of a computer going into people’s homes was a little bit threatening because up to then computers were for big businesses, who were highly technical and sensitive and all that stuff. Most of the personal computer products that were coming out at the time had very techno names. TRS-80 and things like that, so that’s why the name Apple was so golden because it was basic and not technical.”
“For me, though, one of the things I think makes Apple’s logo so iconic is that it’s used sparingly. As I type this on my MacBook, an iPod and iPhone on the desk before me, the only Apple logo visible to my eyes is the small one in the top left-hand corner of my computer display. Apple doesn’t beat you over the head with its logo, but it does use it effectively, and that’s part of the reason it’s so imprinted upon our memory.”
John Fountain is senior writer at Avvio
