What logos say

Apple’s original logo was created by its little-known third founder, Ronald Wayne. 

Wayne was Steve Jobs’ mentor at Atari. His first contribution to Apple was convincing a reluctant Steve Wozniak to go along with Jobs’ proposal to start a company.

With Wozniak on board, Wayne drafted the original partnership agreement, typing up three copies while Jobs and Wozniak looked on.  

Jobs granted Wayne a 10% stake in the partnership on the spot — mostly so Wayne could serve as a tiebreaker between himself and Woz, but also to handle the corporate things neither of them understood. 

Wayne’s tenure lasted just 12 days. Upon reflection, he decided he didn’t want the personal liability that comes with being a partner in a non-limited partnership.

Still, he got a lot done.

“I designed the Apple 1 Operations Manual” Wayne said later, “which included professional circuit architecture diagrams needed to create printed circuit boards needed for mass production of the Apple I.”

He designed the mission-critical “inventory structure” used in production of the Apple I, and, a year later, the Apple II.

And he created Apple’s first logo: a pencil drawing (which he drew himself) of Isaac Newton reading a book in the shade of an apple tree. 

It was a natural-enough choice: the apple, of course, and Newton — an icon of the kind of unorthodox thinking Jobs admired.

It lasted a year.

As Jobs prepared for the launch of the Apple II, he realized the Newton logo was too detailed to reproduce on the casing of a computer. It was also hopelessly old-fashioned. 

Jobs therefore asked Rob Janoff, an art director at a local advertising agency, to develop a new one. His only instruction to Janoff was “don’t make it cute.”

He made it simple. “I just bought a bunch of apples, put them in a bowl, and drew them for a week or so,” he later recalled.

The result was iconic:

The colorful apple was a signal: this computer belongs at home, not in an office. The rainbow stripes advertised that the Apple II had color graphics, a key selling-point at the time. The stylized bite ensured that the apple wouldn’t be mistaken for, say, a cherry. The clean lines and custom font suggested something modern but friendly.

Janoff developed the logo in just two weeks — just the one version — and Jobs accepted it as is.

Variations on Janoff’s theme have defined Apple’s identity ever since.

In 1984, Apple dropped the wordmark, displaying just the colorful apple at the end of the Super Bowl commercial that introduced the first Mac. On the computer itself, the logo was a splash of color that made the Mac’s uncluttered design feel all the more deliberate.

In 1998, the logo went monochrome — sometimes in color, as with the turquoise iMac:

Other times, it appears in shades of grey or simply black, as with the Mac Mini:

The shift to monochrome helped reshape Apple’s image. Its products remained accessible and user-friendly, but became more austere and premium. The minimalist logo was more versatile: it looked fitting on any of Apple’s expanding line of products. It signaled maturation — the shift from quirky startup to established maker of best-in-class consumer tech.

“This minimalist approach has become a signature of Apple’s visual identity,” a history of the brand writes, “allowing the products to speak for themselves while the logo serves as a seal of quality and innovation.”

The rainbow logo was not entirely retired, however. In an ad campaign that ran through 2002, it became a seal of like-minded kinship that aligned Apple with some of the 20th century’s most original thinkers.

The “Think different” ads are considered among the best ever made. They're also unimaginable with Apple’s original logo.

In a way, the entire company is.

Blockworks 2.0

Reid Hannaford explains that the new logo his team designed for Blockworks “represents our products and our promise to deliver layers of insight and transparency to the industry.”

Reid was the second-ever employee hired at Blockworks, which was not quite early enough to make him a third founder. (Although I do think he should have a tie-breaking vote.)

But his hire was a recognition of the importance of communicating a company’s mission through imagery. 

Now, the new imagery he helped create is communicating Blockworks’ new direction: “Our core mission remains the same: to build trust in onchain markets,” Reid writes. “But our focus has shifted from media to data and software.”

The data is available on Blockworks website, framed in graphics designed to invoke “the visual world of people whose job is to interpret readings.”

This newsletter is not as sophisticated as all that. Wayne’s original Newton logo is probably more representative of the content you’ll continue to find here.

But the Blockworks ecosystem has more and more to say — and now the branding to help us say it.

— Byron Gilliam

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