How many degrees of separation?
© Time, inc.
Christopher Bonanos has written an OpEd piece for The New York Times online. Chris is a senior editor at New York magazine and the author of a history of Polaroid for the Princeton Architectural Press to be published next year. (As a disclaimer I must add that he has interviewed me concerning my involvement with Polaroid from 1957-1983.)
His lead-in says it all:
"In the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
In 1977 Jobs and Apple came up with this corporate mark.
Click on this link for the story behind it.
Land and Polaroid (and I) came up with these package designs eight years earlier from 1968-1970.
How many degrees of separation?
Designer and art director Alf Lenni of Copenhagen created this graphic showing how the Polaroid color stripes were morphed into the Apple logo. I'm grateful to him for pointing this out as it had never occurred to me that they would use the same percentages of process colors as Polaroid.
Alf wrote about this: "Here I've taken the exact colors from the Giambarba Polaroid logo, [and] made them run into the first "official" brand Apple logo."
© Alf Lenni
How many degrees of separation?
Precious few?