A lot of companies start the design process by blocking things out with wireframes, like, the contact list goes here, and there’s a big wireframe with an X through it. Apple would start with these gorgeous mock-ups in Photoshop and Flash—or Shockwave at the time. There’s no code behind it, and you can only do one thing, but you get the feel.

under [then CEO] Gil Amelio, design didn’t mean anything. You’d design a product, and marketing would say, “Well, we only gave you $15 to do this and it’s gonna cost us $20, so we’re gonna badge a Dell computer or Canon printer.” We were a marketing-driven company that wasn’t focused on design or even delivering a product. We became just another PC

For the Mac we did a Picasso-like logo done by an artist in San Francisco named John Casado.

These boots I’m wearing are made by Lucchese,

of type you’d see in magazines, anything that might look familiar to people. The goal, always, was real-world references. I was from suburban Philadelphia, so I named the fonts after stops on the Paoli Local—so Rosemont, Paoli, Ardmore, Overbrook. Steve thought city names were fine, but he asked why would we pick these little cities that nobody had

ABIGAIL SARAH BRODY What Apple initiated will be carried on by others. And that’s my mission, too. I’m working on something with another ex–Apple executive. It will be a billion-dollar, world-changing business.

There was an overarching idea of a computer your mom could use. So the typefaces couldn’t look like those weird monospaced computer fonts. I looked at Helvetica and Times New Roman and the kinds

failure to understand what Steve was trying to do with user experience.

was willing to speak on the record for this story, preferring to let the work speak for itself—and to preserve the company’s fastidiously cultivated mythology. As a result, this is a story different from any other you’ve ever read about Apple. It is an oral history of Apple’s design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped