Appledesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group - Softcover

Kunkel, Paul

4.45

53 ratings by Goodreads

9781888001259: Appledesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888001259 ISBN 13: 9781888001259

Publisher: UNKNO, 1997

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To celebrate Apple's twentieth anniversary, AppleDesign provides a rare inside look at the Industrial Design Group, examining the role this small team of creative individuals has played in the rise of Apple from a Silicon Valley garage to a billion-dollar corporation. It details the formation of the Group, outlines their method for turning great ideas into even greater products, reveals many design concepts and products that never reached the marketplace, and offers a glimpse at the triumph and turmoil than results when creative desire meets (and occasionally collides with) corporate reality.
With more than 400 color illustrations and detailed discussion of more than 100 products, design concepts and works-in-progress, AppleDesign provides the most thorough examination of a corporate design group ever published.
From the Macintosh to the PowerBook, the Newton MessagePad, the eMate and the just-released Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, Apple's designers have given us some of the most compelling and enduring products of our time. Their work not only enriches the lives of more than 50 million Apple users worldwide, it influences the computer industry at large, providing strong evidence for those who argue that industrial design is as powerful and relevant an art form as painting, sculpture or architecture.

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Review:

This oversized, coffee-table volume is devoted to the industrial design of every product made at Apple Computer over the course of 20 years. Lavishly illustrated with over 400 large color photographs by photographer Rick English, the book transforms the plastic cases, LCD displays, and disk drives from old Apple IIcs, Lisas, Macs, PowerBooks, and Newtons (and a few technologies that never made it to the street) into objects of fine art. The book's attention to detail, even in the small peripherals, such as the stylus of the Newton--the ubiquitous round stick-on microphone that ships with the Mac--contributes to the technological identity of the Apple brand.

Remember that 20 years ago, when you walked into a campus computing center or office building, you could distinguish an Apple system from an IBM system from across a room. The early IBM PCs were box-shaped--as close to pure squares and rectangles as possible--and buttoned down with garters on the socks like the Big Blue executives who sold them to the world as business machines. In contrast, the physical design of the Apple machines has always represented the company's "alternative" (and borderline arrogant) mindset, appealing to the more artistic user and fueling the left-versus-right-brain debates. In addition to the packaging of the machine, the Mac's graphical user interface and Motorola CPUs provided the artistic cover by which this innovative book could safely be judged.

Today other computer companies casually imitate the technofuturistic curvedness of the once-almost-shocking Apple design. Much like how the set of the movie Blade Runner has influenced many films that followed it, the industrial design of Apple machines continues to shape other companies' computer designs. AppleDesign is interesting both as an historical document and an artistic appreciation of these designs.

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