Rob Janoff on his logo for Apple

The following post was contributed by Touraj Saberivand, the Iranian design partner of Rob Janoff.

While working in their garage in 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak asked Rob Janoff, who had studied design, to create a logo for their first Apple products. When Janoff went to Jobs with final sketches, everything went very smoothly, and the bitten apple has been the symbol of the brand ever since.

Some like to rationalise the bite with different stories. From pointing to the original sin, to the idea that it was in memory of Alan Turing, the father of computer science who, in 1954, was found dead with a suspiciously half-eaten apple beside his body. However, the designer of the logo himself has a different story.

“I was going for the silhouette of an apple, but to make it look more like an apple and not some other round fruit, I did what one does with an apple, I took a bite out of it.”

The bitten apple, nowadays is the subject of cartoonists’ and poster designers’ works. They make jokes out of it, stick it to their cars, and copy it in such an amount that no other logo has ever been. Rob Janoff, back then, a young man, never imagined that Apple would become the brand it has, and his logo the most well-known, even more than Coca Cola and Google. But whatever it was, he is still proud of it after 40 years.

Is this the best logo you’ve designed?

Yes. Nothing quite holds a candle to the Apple logo.

Did you ask Steve why he named the brand Apple?

Not really. I knew that he had been a fruitarian for a period of time and that he lived on a ranch or farm in Northern California for a while where they had an apple orchard (Steve thought an apple was the perfect food). They had a list of names for the company and had to pick one the next day to sign business papers. Apple was the favourite on the list and if they couldn’t come up with something better, Apple was going to be it even though Woz thought they would get sued by Apple Records. They didn’t come up with something better, so Apple it was, and I’m so glad.

What’s the reason behind the bite?

Like many things, stories have a way of getting stretched and changed in the retelling. I was going for the silhouette of an apple, but to make it look more like an apple and not some other round fruit, I did what one does with an apple, I took a bite out of it. The most enlightening part of the project came about ten years later when I started reading the stories about why I designed the logo the way I did. The stories are way more interesting than my rationale. Stories are told and people believe them and the lore gets passed on (all before social media). The fact that people believe the stories tells me that people feel a special connection with it, beyond the love they have for the devices the logo adorns.

What was Steve’s reaction when you presented the logo?

He just smiled and nodded and didn’t say much. I didn’t have to sell hard or pitch the idea. We both liked it and knew it was the way to go.

Your version of the logo had colourful stripes to represent the full-colour displays of Apple. Was the audience supposed to get it?

The coloured stripes did illustrate Apple’s main point of difference when compared to the competition, but it served a more important function. I thought one of my biggest challenges in designing the logo was to make a computer seem friendly enough to bring home for the whole family to use. Computers back then had a harsh and negative connotation, I wanted to create a warm and positive feeling about the Apple computer.

How effective you think the logo was in Apple’s success?

Their success is mostly due to Steve Jobs knowing what people wanted in a device before they knew they wanted it. Also Steve’s super high quality standards for functionality and design were a huge factor. That said, I do think the logo helped a lot. The love people have for Apple products goes hand in hand with Apple logo love. If they didn’t love the logo they wouldn’t put it in the rear window of their cars.

What’s the most important feature of a well-designed logo?

Simplicity. Too often clients have long laundry lists of elements the logo “must have.” That’s a recipe for failure. Logos need to be simple and distinctive or they won’t be remembered. The frequency that a logo is seen is a huge factor in the logo’s success. The fact that the Apple logo was on the corner of every screen of every Apple product helped to make it an internationally known (and loved) icon.