When we learnt that Apple was going to publish a retrospective of their products we just knew it would be no ordinary book. No, this book, Designed by Apple in California, would be “printed on specially milled, custom-dyed paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost ink.” Well, if you have the budget and an audience and willing to pay, why not?
In all seriousness, it looks quite beautiful. As Jony Ive explains in the foreword:
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.
As with many books of this kind the most dated looking designs are actually those that have only just been superseded, where they exist in a strange hinterland between classic and futuristic.
