Apple’s logo evolution
If I ask you to brainstorming something about apple, you may say: iphone,ipad, ipod..etc, I believe that the first visual come in most people’s mind will be the white big apple logo. Most of the time, our first perception of a brand is created by logo. Thus, logo is one of the most important virtual strategy which will help a company presents a brand. I recently working on the project of rebranding of the MBA society. Our first few meetings are all about the logo design. Thus remind me the topic about logo revolution.
When I search for the logo revolution, I got bunch of logo changes in most of big brands. Why do they want to change logo??
Take apple as an example, it change from the colourful apple to black and then be the pure white one. As we can see from apple, its logo changes along with the product development. White is the “brand color” for apple. Recent years, apples’s innovation oriented, delicate brand name and its white flagship products attracts increasing number of consumers in the electronic product market. The pure white logo exactly fits its innovated, delicate product and company image. When I worked on the group on the design of MBA society’s logo, the project manager first lead us think about what image this society create for pubic. The change made on the logo is along with the change in the company’s image. Logo evolution is actually a company’s change evolution. The one who position its product well on their target customers and choose the suitable logo for itself will win the war in the market .
Apple logo history (Appendix)
The original logo was designed by Ron Wayne, who started Apple with Jobs and Woz in 1976. In 1977 White sold his portion of Apple back to Jobs and Woz when they incorporated. The image is a pen and ink illustration of Sir Issac Newton leaning against an apple tree with a portion of a William Wordsworth poem running around the border: “Newton…A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone” (Prelude, Book III, Residence at Cambridge)
Steve Jobs decided to scrap this image because he felt that Wayne’s logo was too cerebral and not easily reproduced at small sizes. In 1977, with Wayne gone from the company, Jobs turned to the Regis McKenna Advertising Agency to produce a new, more iconic logo. After several attempts and variations (and a ton of money spent), the result was the most iconic of all Apple logos. The Rainbow Apple logo.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was bleeding money, and Jobs and Co. realized that the Apple logo could be leveraged to their advantage. Placing a large rainbow Apple logo on top of the original Bondi Blue iMac, for example, would have looked silly, childish, and out of place. Not exactly the direction Jobs wanted to lead Apple in. So instead of placing a somewhat minuscule rainbow colored Apple logo on its products, Apple began placing sizeable and Monochrome styled logos on its products.