Interview with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo
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”.
We presented two versions of the logo. One with and one without the bite. Just in case he thought the bite was too cute.
Partially [hippy culture] was a really big influence. Both Steve and I came from that place, but the real solid reason for the stripes was that the Apple II was the first home or personal computer that could reproduce images on the monitor in color. So it represents color bars on the screen.
Turing the famous supposed father of computer science who committed suicide in the early 50’s was british and was accused of being homosexual, which he was. He was facing a jail sentence so he committed suicide to avoid all that. So, I heard one of the legends being that the colored logo was an homage to him. People think I did the colored stripes because of the gay flag. And, that was something really thought for a long time. The other really cool part was that apparently he killed himself with a cyanide laced apple. And, then I found out Alan Turing’s favorite childhood story was Snow White where she falls asleep forever for eating a poisoned apple to be woken up by the handsome prince. Anyway, when I explain the real reason why I did the bite it’s kind of a let down. But I’ll tell you. I designed it with a bite for scale, so people 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. It goes across cultures. If anybody ever had an apple he probably bitten into it and that’s what you get. It was after I designed it, that my creative director told me: “Well you know, there is a computer term called byte”. And I was like: “You’re kidding!” So, it was like perfect, but it was coincidental that it was also a computer term.
And, people ask me: did you design it on a computer? And of course at the time computers couldn’t really do that for me. It was only years later till the Mac was designed, developed and refined that I even start working on a computer. At the time it was all pencil and paper, glue and cut paper, pens and all that stuff.
