“Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design. The book is dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs.
20 years of Apple’s history are now encapsulated in a new Photo Book telling the story of design at Apple. “Designed by Apple in California,” which covers products from 1998’s iMac to 2015’s Apple Pencil, also documents the materials and techniques used by Apple’s design team over two decades of innovation.
“The idea of genuinely trying to make something great for humanity was Steve’s motivation from the beginning, and it remains both our ideal and our goal as Apple looks to the future,” said Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. “This archive is intended to be a gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years. We hope it brings some understanding to how and why they exist, while serving as a resource for students of all design disciplines.”
Shot by photographer Andrew Zuckerman in a deliberately spare style, the book’s 450 images illustrate Apple’s design process as well as its finished products.
Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the technology sector with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud.
Apple’s chief design officer used a custom form of paper, because normal paper apparently doesn’t work for printing all of the white objects Apple makes.
“There were a few things we needed to do to accurately and objectively portray these products. Of course, many of these products are white, so the off-the-shelf printing processes really didn’t do an adequate job in describing the colour and surface of those products. Unsurprisingly, we ended up developing custom forms of paper and custom inks,” Jony Ive told Wallpaper magazine.
In the book’s foreword, Ive explains:
While this is a design book, it is not about the design team, the creative process or product development. It is an objective representation of our work that, ironically, describes who we are. It describes how we work, our values, our preoccupations and our goals. We have always hoped to be defined by what we do rather than by what we say.
We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.
“Designed by Apple in California” is available in two sizes and printed on specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink. This linen-bound, hardcover volume was developed over an eight-year period.
