Apple Logo

I recently read an article that introduced the interview of original Apple logo designer, Rob Janoff. Through his interview, I got some fun behind-the-scenes stories of their changed logos.

Apple is best-known for hardware products, such as Macintosh computers, ipod, iphone, and ipad. Since 1977, when Apple got an account, the very first rainbow Apple logo was introduced to customers. In 1977, Rob Janoff was working for an art director at the Regis Mckenna advertising agency; there he met Steve Jobs, who was his boss’s friend. When he got the brief for the logo, they had a previous logo, which was a drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. And the direction from Steve Jobs was “Don’t make it cute”. Then Rob Janoff noticed that Steve realized that logo would not work for Apple II because of a prototype for the design of the shell. Rob Janoff presented them with two versions of apple logos, one with the bite and one without the bite. He worried that Steve Jobs would think the bitten apple was too cute, but fortunately, he went with the bite one.

ome people think that the colored stripes represent the gay flag because Rob Janoff is gay. But the colored stripes represent the colored bars on the screen of first Apple II personal computer. And the apple does not allude to the biblical event of Eve biting into the forbidden fruit. Rob Janoff’s creation is a wonderful urban legend. Somebody starts it, and then people go, “oh yeah, that must be it”. The current logo on the computers was changed by the design firm Landor & Associates. And Rob Janoff said that he liked the changed logo because stripes served their purpose, and they are dated.

At the end of his interview, Janoff pointed out the importance of making a logo simple, just like Trileaf designers have pointed out in our blogs. I hope you had fun reading a summary of the interview. Tell us what you think about Apple’s logos, and share with us if you know more fun facts behind the story of this logo.

To read the original interview visit: http://creativebits.org/interview/interview_rob_janoff_designer_apple_logo