Apple Industrial Design Group

The Apple Industrial Design Group (IDg) is the industrial design arm of Apple Inc. responsible for crafting the appearance of all Apple products.

Apple industrial design was established in April 1977 when Steve Jobs hired Jerry Manock to design the enduring Apple II case. Jobs was notoriously obsessed with design and style, rumored to linger over appliances at Macy's for inspiration and together with Manock set about establishing the design language that would be used by Apple for the next 10 years.

In addition to the Apple II, Manock came to manage Apple Design Guild which consisted of a loose band of in-house designers, among them Bill Dresselhaus—responsible for the Lisa—and Rob Gemmell—responsible for the Apple IIe and IIc. It was from this group that a project called "Snow White" emerged. The importance that Jobs put on appearance led to a desire to begin the search for a "world-class" designer to give Apple a uniform design language. It was Manock's suggestion that it be made a contest and proceeded to solicit designers from the pages of magazines.

It was out of this contest that Hartmut Esslinger came to Apple and created a unique design language which took the project's code-name and helped establish Apple with a serious corporate image. Though Esslinger originally created a design for the Macintosh, it wasn't until the Apple IIc, designed with Rob Gemmell, that Apple would first introduce the new design language. From the introduction of the Apple II through the Macintosh Plus, Apple's products favored a beige-like color scheme of differing shades. The Apple IIc was the first to introduce a product with a lighter, creamy off-white color, known in-house as "Fog" (though Esslinger originally argued for bright-white), a color that would persist in all Snow White design language products until the introduction of the Apple IIGS in late 1986, which marked a turning point in the unification of Apple products. Apple selected a warm gray color they called "Platinum" for the IIGS and all subsequent computers until the introduction of the iMac in 1998 (although a darker shade of gray was adopted for the PowerBook line and various peripherals).

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