Apple encourages short-term digital detox by urging its fans to pick the tech giant’s newly released hardbound book chronicling 20 years of Apple’s design. Christened, Designed by Apple in California, the tome covers products from 1998’s iMac to 2015’s Apple Pencil. A must-have Christmas gift and collectible for Apple fans, this luxurious coffee table book also documents the materials and techniques used by Apple’s design team over two decades of innovation.
Paying tribute to Steve Jobs, the book includes 450 photographs, shot by photographer Andrew Zuckerman in a deliberately spare style, of past and current Apple products as well as its design process.
Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer states that, “This archive is intended to be a gentle gathering of many of the products the team has designed over the years. We hope it brings some understanding to how and why they exist, while serving as a resource for students of all design disciplines.”
The book’s foreword reads, While this is a design book, it is not about the design team, the creative process or product development. It is an objective representation of our work that, ironically, describes who we are. It describes how we work, our values, our preoccupations and our goals. We have always hoped to be defined by what we do rather than by what we say. We strive, with varying degrees of success, to define objects that appear effortless. Objects that appear so simple, coherent and inevitable that there could be no rational alternative.
Designed by Apple in California is available in two sizes and printed on specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink. This linen-bound, hardcover volume was developed over an eight-year period. While the smaller version of the book is available for $199, the big brother is up for $299.
