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Fascinating original set of color printing proofs for the 1989 Apple Computer brochure ‘What can you get out of a Macintosh?,’ deriving from the personal collection of Ron Fernandez, a former member of Apple’s Creative Services department and senior MacOS product manager for printing, type, and graphics. The proof set contains five color 14 x 9 spreads for the brochure’s covers and inner pages, each with an overlay cel bearing editorial felt tip notations and dated between April 18-20, 1989. Separated and output as four-color negatives from a Mac, each spread features integrated type and graphics, and includes sections like ‘Black-and-White Publishing,’ ‘Color Publishing,’ ‘Pixels and Halftones,’ and ‘Multimedia Publishing.’ The front and back covers are appropriately titled ‘What can you get out of a Macintosh?’ and ‘What we got out of a Macintosh.’ In overall fine condition. A landmark in the digital publishing space, the ‘What can you get out of a Macintosh?’ brochure marked the first full-color piece requiring no manual paste up and output directly from a publishing app.
Accompanied by two draft proofs of the brochure, five stapled final versions, and three internal pre-email memos from An Croll, head of Marcom, and Bruce Mowery and Hugh Dubberly of Apple Creative Services, with the latter writing: “Ron Fernandez and Dennis Gobets have outdone themselves again. They have produced and delivered a brochure produced not only entirely on the Macintosh, with color photos, but also with no film stripping. Ron used Ready-Set-Go! to design and format the document. He sent that file to a Crossfield prepress system, which produced negative film separations with all elements in place. This is the first piece to be produced in this way-on any prepress system. Anywhere. The piece is being included in the ‘Wave 1’ shipment for the ‘Communicating’ launch.”
Per the consignor: ‘Given Creative Services’ unique position as Apple’s internal design agency and an (unofficial) R&D group, we were often approached by software and hardware developers looking to showcase their capabilities. We had been working with the developers of Ready, Set, Go! (RSG!) a page layout app competing with Aldus Pagemaker, and Crosfield Lightspeed, a UK-based digital imaging and output solution competing with Scitex.
The annual Seybold publishing conference was a critical event for Apple to showcase Macintosh graphic capabilities to people in the commercial printing industry. Building on my experience with the Aspen postcard project and the 1988 annual report, I realized that with RSG! and Crosfield, we could write and design a four-color brochure for distribution at Seybold, which would require no hand-assembly of page layouts or color negative composition. All type and graphics could be output directly as fully-integrated, four-color, full-page negatives.
This would be an industry first.
A combination of CDs, Zip drives, and other large-format media, along with lots of back-and-forth FedEx deliveries, made up for the absence of high-speed Internet. Crosfield’s Boston office was our primary contact, and, of course, problems cropped up along the way.
The Crosfield system was only a PostScript emulator and couldn’t render Apple’s corporate Garamond Condensed typeface. We found a reasonable facsimile from Bitstream and, not without great consternation from all the brand guardians in the department, it was agreed that, for the sake of the demonstration, the alternative typeface could be used.
But the file complexity stressed the capabilities of the Crosfield system, and we weren’t able to get everything to work. With time running out, Crosfield management made the call to output the files at UK headquarters, hoping that with key development and technical support on-site, the problems could be worked out.
We shipped the latest round of files to Great Britain. There they were printed and, on the first leg of the trip back to California, hand-carried on the Concorde by a Crosfield rep to New York.”
