It was Esslinger who first pushed Apple out of a drab beige world toward cleaner, whiter hardware, and his partnership with Steve Jobs in this period helped define Apple’s core values as a user-focused, design-centric company that endure to this day.

Esslinger documents this partnership in his new book Keep it Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple. “It became very clear to me that we were competing for an opportunity to help Steve Jobs create much more than a visual design language,” Esslinger writes (you can read an excerpted chapter here). “Apple needed a cutting-edge system that would enable Steve to translate his vision into marketable products, and Frog was in the process of helping him build it. We were involved in a real revolution – one that would extend well beyond the changes our work would bring to Apple.”