Apple “Baby Mac” by Hartmut Esslinger
In 1982, Apple was in its sixth year of existence, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s cofounder and chairman, was twenty-eight years old. Steve, intuitive and fanatical about great design, realized that the company was in crisis. The company’s products were failing against IBM’s PC’s and they were all ugly. The company’s precious CEO, Michael Scott, had created different business divisions for each product line. Each division had its own head of design and developed its products the way it wanted to.
Steve’s desire to end the disjoined approach gave birth to a strategic design project that would revolutionize Apple’s brand and product lines, change the trajectory of the company’s future, and eventually redefine the way the world thinks about and uses consumer electronics and communication technologies.
The idea for the project was inspired by the work of Richardson Smith design agency (later acquired by fitch) for Xerox, in which the designers collaborated with multiple divisions within Xerox to create a single high-level ‘design language’ that the company could implement throughout its organization.
Apple would choose a final winner and then use that design as the framework for its new design language. no one knew at that time however, that we were in the process of transforming Apple into a company whose design-based strategy and innovation-over-money approach would make it a global success.
That final winner was the “Baby Mac”.
Read full article: Design Boom
