West of Eden

"West of Eden" is about the first decade of Apple Computer: from the garage days to the departure of Steve Jobs. It's a fascinating read, especially its account of Apple's intense, chaotic culture and turbulent transition from a startup to a major American company.

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Design: Rather than use the actual colors of the classic Apple logo, I created them from red, green, and blue stripes, the way they'd roughly appear if you looked closely at a low-res color display from the 1980s. (Low-res these screens might have been, but Apple was proud enough of the Apple II's color capabilities to directly reference them in the rainbow nature of the logo.)

Besides the retro-screen effect, I liked the primary colors because they're bright, bold, and don't always work well with each other; characteristics found in many of Apple's smartest people. Only if you take a step back and unfocus your eyes can you can see them blend from individual neon stripe patterns into the Apple rainbow palette.

And that, of course, was one of Apple's challenges: weaving its various idiosyncratic geniuses—many of whom did not think highly of authority, bureacracy, or other corporate annoyances—into a company capable of meeting deadlines and shipping products. Disjunction and dysfunction are important parts of both the story and this design, which I tried to make suggestive of a jittery, unsynchronized CRT. "West of Eden," above all, is a story of painful evolution: the process through which Apple's exploding success eroded its driving spirit and cost it many of the people who had built that success in the first place.

That's the reason for the horizontal bar design's other, more understated influence: the eight-bar IBM logo.

Startup Apple—particularly Steve Jobs—had nothing but contempt for IBM. They saw it as a soulless machine personifying everything bad about big companies: the anti-Apple, capable only of mediocre technology and groupthink. The possibility that Apple could become such a thing itself would have sent a chill through any of its early employees.

But West of Eden's larger, bitterer story arc is how Apple shifted from a startup to a big company, with a speed that sent it reeling towards the sprawling internal dysfunction that marked its decline through the 90s. Pervasive infighting, layers of ineffective management, and a lack of focus resulted in an organization that had more in common with early Apple's perception of IBM than the company that created either the original Apple or the Mac. I thought a subtle reference to that—a touch of IBM in the hallowed Apple logo—was consistent with the subject matter of the book.

(Someone who's familiar with the classic Apple logo might notice that there are only *five* colors here, instead of the usual six. That's not an oversight; I took that liberty because I wanted to stick to colors that could be created with the full-brightness red, green, and blue color palette I was using, and orange can't be created that way.)

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Typography: most of the books about Apple I've seen used some attempt at Apple Garamond on their covers, often a typeface that looked worse than the original. In other cases, they'd use Chicago—another Apple classic—or, failing that, something pixelated that looked "computer".

I wanted to avoid "Apple" typefaces, or anything overtly digital. It seemed clichéd. I had in mind something clean and direct, in contrast to the chaotic illustration. I experimented with a few different typefaces—Helvetica was my first choice, but I thought it was too bland and default. I finally went with IBM Plex Sans, mostly because I really like it, and partly because I thought it was perversely funny to use a typeface developed by a company that 1980s Apple considered the epitome of evil.