Frog Design founder Hartmut Esslinger’s new book is now available. Esslinger, a designer who has worked with companies such as Wega, Louis Vuitton, Sony, SAP and Apple, has explained in his book how Jobs hired him “to transform the successful yet scattered startup into a brand with a globally recognizable design mantra,” reported CNET. The process of transforming the company started way back in 1982, when Jobs realized that each product brought out by the company had a different design theme as each division had its own design head, who all had different design ideas.
This meant no two Apple product lines shared a common design language, which largely contributed to its failure. Mac geeks will enjoy seeing photos of Esslinger’s early Apple concept work, like proposals for a Macbook laptop and flatscreen workstation circa 1982. Examinations of his personal work aside, Design Forward is not intended to be a vanity piece, nor a mere look backwards; Esslinger’s current position as a professor of industrial design at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts provides him with exposure to plenty of young students, and he incorporates select examples of their work in a series of case studies. The book is available at Amazon ( see the link bellow).