Customer Reviews

Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This fascinating book chronicles the history of Apple Computer using photographs of Apple t-shirts. The end result is a lavish, 204-page, hardcover, coffee table book with over 1,500 full-color photographs, most explained with interesting behind-the-scenes stories that you'll find nowhere else. Travel down memory lane spotting favorite shirts from the past, from ones celebrating new product introductions to ones complaining about staff cuts.

...and I mean that literally. I recalled seeing another book about Apple t-shirts, probably published in the late 80s or early 90s, that was more compelling in design and quality. This book, as the 2-star reviewer mentioned, is rather random and jumbled. Also, the color reproduction is, as Steve would've said, CR*P! In some photos, colors are so off that reds appear purple and yellows appear orange. Many are extremely dark. They must've printed this without any color correction to the art or press check. For this book to represent, even tangentially, a company that takes its design sense and corporate identity extremely seriously is a travesty.

I even recommended this book to an Apple fan pen-pal before I received it. If I'd waited a few days for its arrival, I wouldn't have recommended it.

Since I put in some time in Apple's merchandising and Creative Services offices, and worked with several t-shirt vendors to produce internal and consumer t-shirts to Apple's exacting specifications, I can't help but feel there is a LOT missing in this book...not only in terms of the t-shirts depicted, but the stories behind them, and the presentation thereof.

Oh, I wish I could remember the name of the other mysterious, and apparently unavailable, book!

The idea behind this book is great, to use T-shirts to essay the history of Apple Computer, and perhaps of personal computing generally. I think it was Jean-Louis Gassée who first quipped that all product development at apple began with "step one: order the t-shirt". Gordon Thygeson photographed an astonishing number of shirts covering important products, unimportant ones, forgotten ones, random events (the announcements of the 1991 budget!), teams, and so forth.

Unfortunately, there is no narrative here, and the t-shirts themselves are typically not very interesting. The arrangement is not chronological, so we don't walk through the history of Apple. Nor are they arranged to make any kind of statement about the causes of Apple's vast initial success then near extinction at the hands of Microsoft (the book was published before the company's current renaissance). Instead, we have "shirts about software," then "shirts about desktop computers," then "shirts about peripherals." There is no insight or drama or anything that would make this of interest beyond a cursory flipping-through.

And unfortunately, most of the shirts are amateurish and ugly, so there isn't opportunity to admire Apple's evolving design sensibilities.

If you have the choice, get Appledesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group, which was released before this book but which gives a much better window into the ways that Apple differs from other companies.