Photo: Courtesy of Jonathan Zufi/Iconic Book.
What will the future hold for Apple? A nostalgic look at the brand's brilliant past could hint at potential new advances. Now, just in time for the holidays, you can do just that thanks to Australian photographer Jonathan Zufi’s new coffee table book, Iconic.
Zufi was inspired to seek out an Apple II (the computing jewel of ’77) to satisfy an urge to play an old video game. The search led to an exploratory trip down the eBay rabbit hole. Zufi was disappointed with the retro products’ promotional images, which were bleak, utilitarian, and did no justice to their innovative subjects. He was struck with an idea: Why not recapture these machines in their fully glory?
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Zufi got to work and soon Iconic was born. The book explores the “visual design language” of six divisions of Apple products: desktops, portables, peripherals, iDevices, prototypes, and packaging. Each chapter is introduced by key Apple pioneers, including cofounder Steve Wozniak, early engineer Daniel Kottke, architect Neal Pann, and journalist Jim Dalrymple.
It was important to Zufi that the book lend itself to a serene physical experience. Digital innovation may be Apple’s forte, but Zufi doesn’t believe there’s yet any adequate cyber equivalent to the experience of reading a book. "I find eBooks to be distracting, especially on an iOS device where emails, push notifications, and phone calls interfere with reading," he told Co.Design. "I also wanted people to leaf through the pages of the book slowly, not just swipe through them as quickly as possible.”
As far as what Apple’s future holds? The pieces are right in front of us; how we (re)construct them is up to individual insight. It was Steve Jobs who famously said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Zufi is patient and optimistic that a major, culture-shifting breakthrough will come again for the brand: "It's hard to wait for that next project to shift industries, but Apple has done it before, and I believe they will do it again."
You can order Iconic through Zufi's site, starting at $75.
(Co.Design)