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Letters of Distinction
As a kid growing up in a Mac family (my dad brought home the first 128K version in 1984), I always sided with the Apple crowd. Back then, of course, DOS - and later Microsoft's creepily parasitic Windows-dressing - was no match for Mac's GUI. No contest. Not even worth talking about, really. It just was.
I even had a kind of cult Mac club at Kealing back around '89-'90. A group of us that would skip the noisy cafeteria (or else sneak food out of it) and hang out in Mr. VanNort's classroom full of Woz-edition IIci's and a coveted Mac II with 4-bit color. There are still a few of us out there, I suppose. Like Jon Gilbert or Cody Koeniger. Or Chris Reeve (remember his Foreign Design BBS?). Not that I really keep up with those people anymore. I doubt Cody still has the Apple 1200 baud modem my parents sold him back in the day for $50. You know, the kind that sat under the rotary phone, with little grooves for the AT&T Bakelite feet to rest upon.
Geez. Doesn't John C. Dvorak write for PC Magazine now? And whatever happened to the inimitable Guy Kawasaki? Is LaCie still in business?
Anyway, beyond sheer usability or OS stability, one of the attractive things about Apple was just how stylish and spunky they seemed compared to Big Blue. From the OS and the computer itself to the kinds of people who built and used them, there was a cult of personality around Apple. And then there were TBWA-Chiat-Day's snazzy marketing campaigns. The 1984 Superbowl ad. And the fun yet classy Apple Garamond that graced all their copy.
Well, until recently, that is.
Has anyone noticed that Apple Garamond is being phased out in favor of some generic chunky sans-serif thing? I think the new corporate typeface - currently used for all product labeling and their website - is called Myriad. Which seems fitting, given that it pretty much looks like every other sans-serif font out there. Goodbye brand distinction, hello homogenized milk.
I'll be blunt: it looks cheap. It looks commodity. It does not have anywhere near the class and charm of Apple Garamond. I hate it.
Apple Garamond was so distinctive that just seeing it clued you in that you were looking at an Apple ad and that this was a company that was Thinking Different. The new Myriad-based ads look as if someone grabbed anyoldfont off the shelf and slapped it over a photograph in Quark. Or, in other words, they look pretty much like everything else out there but for the iPod or PowerBook prominently looming in the background. Okay, so the product itself looks kinda cool. Great. Uh, where's the ad design?
I've always been a design junkie and a lover of typefaces. I just find that stuff cool. How one develops a form to perfectly send a message or fit a function; the art and craft of unifying style and substance into a coherent whole. A perfect design seems at once beautiful and inevitable, something inseparable from content. And it's damn hard to do.
Every once in awhile, a corporate logo or typeface or ad campaign achieves this rare sense of identity and becomes a Design Exemplar studied for decades afterwards. The AT&T Bell. The original US Post Office Stylized Eagle. The Columbia Records Eye.
And like everything else in the land of Corporate, some idiot sees fit to trash them in favor of streamlined or reinvented replacements. Hasn't anyone figured out that logos composed of abstract jumbles of dots and lines all look the same? That seeing the same old Futura and Helvetica and Times in copy after copy is just getting dull? Is it just me, or are the vagaries of the new Agilent and Accenture and Innovan (or whatever) indicative of businesses that really don't know what they're doing anymore? Someone please tell me: why should I deal with a business going through an identity crisis?
To me, Apple Garamond was a corporate typeface milestone. It was one of the few times a company created their own unique font to represent themselves. But how fitting, though, that of all companies, it would be Apple. What kind of outfit goes to all the trouble of cooking up their own version of a venerated typeface like Garamond? Who? The company that brought desktop publishing to the world, the company that clearly cared that your stupid church newsletter looked cool and unique when it rolled off the LaserWriter, dressed up with inset graphics and letters of distinction.
That was the Apple that Apple Garamond announced. Quirky. Different. Stylish. And I miss it, the AT&T Bell and stately Post Office Eagle, and all the long forgotten and abandoned artifacts of classic corporate design that are still to be found in rusted East Texas towns.
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