Inventing the Apple logo

The story behind the most memorable IT company logos can be a fascinating tale. One day we’ll get around to telling more of them, but this weekend we’ll share a few details behind Apple’s apple.

This comes from a short-lived US magazine entitled Sync, produced by tech media mogul Ziff Davis with the aim of merging gadgets and lifestyle for the digerati – think T3 meets GQ with a dash of Wired on the side.

The original Sync article is lost in time but a transcript has resurfaced online, supplied by the article’s author Matt Rodbard. The gist of it is that the head of Silicon Valley-based PR relations agency Regis McKenna was mates with a young guy named Steve Jobs who had some crazy ideas about personal computers, or microcomputers as they were then called.

In 1977 the company agreed to do a bit of freebie work for Jobs’ newly-created company, Apple Computer, including the design of a logo.

That task fell to graphic designer Rob Janoff. “For inspiration, the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, buy a bag of apples and slice them up. I just stared at the wedges for hours” Janoff recalls.

The original design was a side view of an apple with a bite taken from the right side. The logo was black in order to save on printing costs, but Jobs prevailed that it needed to be more colourful, “arguing that colour was the key to humanising the company,” Janoff recalls. “So I just put colours where I thought they should be, not even thinking about a prism.”

It’s worth noting that a decade later Apple did shift to a monochromatic version of the logo for a few short years, but this was soon replaced by stylised and updated 3D logos using glossy gradients and glows to suit the times and continue the ‘organic’ link to the Mac being a more human-centric computer.

By the way, Janoff never received any special acknowledgement for creating a logo that’s regarded as one of the world’s most powerful brands. He got nothing, he says – “not even a holiday card.”