Apple's Nineteen Eighty-Four

It was a bleak picture, Apple - one of the biggest players in today's computing market, painted with their infamous advertisement of 1984. The T.V. advert, which borrowed from Orwell's dystopian vision of the same year, aired only twice, but had an impact far outweighing its precedence. Apple weren't messing about, they had recruited big-shot director Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame to put it together, and at only a minute long it cost them around $1.5 million Dollars to produce. It was shown once during a late-night show in late 1983, and then once more during one of the biggest annual events in American broadcasting - The Superbowl - where it would have had the attention of a possible 90 million viewers. So now take yourselves back (if possible) to January 22nd, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders are taking on the Washington Redskins, there's a third quarter time-out (if that means anything to you) and the Superbowl, as a platform for media advertisement, is about to change...



Apple were days from revolutionising the world's computing market with their Macintosh computer, and soon to free the consumer public of the oppressive "Big Brother" figure recognised as being Apple's main rivals, IBM. And how had they planned on doing this? And why had they appeared so confident in their claims? Because Apple were soon to make the first Graphic User Interface (GUI) widely available to public and commercial computing (not long after one failed attempt with their LISA model). This meant that anyone, with a little training, could make use of a computer without having to be advanced in coding and command lines. The interface provided users with windows, pull-down menus, clickable buttons, scroll bars, icons, images, and most notably, ease of use. And so, as a result, came the era of Desktop Publishing.

Before the advent of Desktop Publishing there were typesetters producing commercial prints; compositors working by hand with their inked presses and cast metal sorts, and later with machinery. There were machines in the second half of the 1970's and in the early 80's - mini-computers - which used text markup languages; the descendants of which are still in use today; most commonly on the Internet. These methods, however, were costly and required specialists. But, with the birth of the Macintosh, and the array of software that was to be produced for use with it such as Macromedia FreeHand, QuarkXPress and Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator packages, people could publish designs and arrangements from the comfort of their homes or offices. The Macintosh allowed users to design, preview and print their own layouts for the first time, and at a crisp 300 dots per inch; an amazing development for communication design and graphic imaging.

But it was not without its downfalls. During these early years, desktop publishing acquired a bad reputation from untrained users who created and unleashed poorly-organized layouts with ransom-note effects. A noticeable gap existed between the skilled designers and the amateurs, but things were to progress. Now, with the rise of new media in our current culture and the on-going expansion of software capabilities, the future of desktop publishing, commercially or otherwise, does seem an exciting one. Especially as the reach and possibilities of this multi-faceted discipline continue to extend and grow.




As for the legacy of a certain aforementioned advertisement, I came across this whilst channel-hopping one evening...



Very nearly a quarter of a century on and still it seems to maintain a firm place in advertisers minds!

Just as fascinating though, is the ad campaign Apple followed the 1984 commercial with in '85 for their Macintosh Office package. Obviously an attempt to recreate the same kind of success and tone they had achieved with the previous campaign, it comes off as overtly grim, and even insulting to potential customers! Unlike the 1984 ad, it was a failure, and it's not hard to see why...