Pages

Monday, July 24, 2023

Apple's Logo And The Temptation Of Eve

 I was reading something recently about Satanic symbolism in corporate logos and the article included the Apple logo--an Apple with a bite taken out of it--and suggested that it was to represent the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil (traditionally portrayed as an apple) given to Eve by Satan. Silly, I thought. But just a few days later I came across this article from the Daily Mail on "The strange reason why Apple's logo has a bite taken out of it, revealed."

    The initial Apple logo was inspired by [Isaac] Newton, with Apple co-founder Ron Wayne depicting the scientist sitting under a tree. 

    However the more complex design was soon changed into the Apple logo we all know today, with the exception of a rainbow pattern. 

    The simple and sleek design has held up for decades, and Rob Janoff, the genius behind it, revealed the real reason why the Apple logo has a bite out of it. 

    At the time he designed the logo, in 1977, Rob worked for the agency Regis McKenna, who handled the Apple 'start-up'.

    Neither Rob nor CEO Steve Jobs were as rich or sophisticated as they are today, and Rob's only direction was 'don't make it cute'. 

    Speaking on the meaning behind the bite, he told Forbes that the apple shape didn't actually have anything to do with computers at the time. 

    He was adamant to use the fruit, and was concerned Apple would lose a lot of 'fun-ness' without it.

    Luckily, Rob was not given a brief and joked: 'This logo we all know today would never have happened if I listened to everybody.'

    He explained: 'It's to get people to notice that an Apple computer was not some piece of hard-edged metal that has no place in your home and that your kid wouldn't want to be near.

    'Lots of different fruits have a stem, are sort of round with a leaf dangling off of it. So the bite in the apple was initially meant to indicate that it was an apple, and not something else.'

    The designer revealed that the bite in the apple is to distinguish the fruit from a cherry, admitting in an interview with Creative Bits that the truth is 'kind of a let down.'

    Rob added the the bite metaphorically indicated biting into 'all the knowledge' that the computer contained, and also related to the computer term 'byte'. 

 So even if it wasn't the whole reason, it was inspired by the temptation of Eve.

No comments:

Post a Comment