Until today, I didn’t know that the original Apple logo’s “bite” was designed to accommodate a lowercase “a”. Thank goodness the redundant wordmark was quickly eliminated, leaving only the famous bite mark.
I found the story here, on Brainpickings.
3 comments
Comments are closed.
The Beatles also had a logo for their Co. Apple in the late 60’s, they even released a lot of records with a logo of an Apple, I was wondering if Apple had to buy the logo from them or if it’s a completely different logo?
Merrill, as I understand it, you can have two similar trademarks as long as they represent companies in two separate and distinct business categories. The Beatles were doing music and Apple Was doing computers, so nobody would confuse them. But then Apple Computers started to get into the music business with iTunes. When that happened, there was overlap of business activites and legal disputes ensued.
At first, personal computers didn’t even make sounds, let alone music, but when computers acquired speakers and began to make alert sounds, lawyers warned of potential conflicts. One of the early alert sounds made by Macintosh computers was called “Sosumi”. Sounds kind of Japanese, doesn’t it? But it was a bit of a joke… “So sue me.”
Back in the 70s, every logo/wordmark combo looked like a key pointing to the right… the logo on the left, the wordmark as the shaft of the key. Your Apple example follows the convention of the time perfectly.