Did You Know? Why the Apple Logo Has a Bite in It.

It's one of the most recognised symbols on earth. A simple apple, one leaf, and a single bite taken out of the right-hand side. No name, no tagline, no explanation.

And over the years, people have read an awful lot into that bite. A nod to Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. A tribute to Alan Turing, the father of computer science, who died beside a half-eaten apple. A clever pun on "byte", the unit of digital information. Even a wink at Newton and his falling apple.

They're brilliant stories. They're also all completely untrue. The real reason is far more practical, and for designers, far more interesting.

First, a bit of context. Apple was founded in 1976, and its very first logo looked nothing like the one we know today. It was a detailed illustration of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, an apple poised above his head. Beautiful, intricate and utterly useless on a product. Shrink it down and you couldn't read it on a circuit board, let alone a box.

So when Apple prepared to launch the Apple II in 1977, its first real consumer product, it needed something that could work at any size. The job went to Rob Janoff, an art director at the agency handling Apple's account.

The brief from Steve Jobs was famously short. Don't make it cute. That was more or less it.

Janoff's process is a lovely reminder that great design often starts with something completely analogue. He bought a bag of apples, put them in a bowl, and spent about a week drawing them.

Then he hit the problem that gives us the bite.

A plain, round fruit with a little leaf on top doesn't necessarily say "apple". Scaled down small, that same silhouette could just as easily be a cherry, a tomato or a peach. The shape was ambiguous, and ambiguity is the enemy of a logo that has to be recognised in a fraction of a second.

His solution was beautifully simple. To make it unmistakably an apple, he did the most natural thing in the world. He took a bite out of it. As Janoff himself put it, he "did what one does with an apple", and in one move the shape became impossible to mistake for anything else.

Here's the part Janoff didn't plan, and it's a gift for anyone who loves a good design story. Only after he'd finished the design did his creative director point out that "bite" sounds exactly like "byte", the fundamental unit of computer data.

Janoff hadn't intended it at all. A perfect, on-brand pun for a computer company, stumbled into entirely by accident. Sometimes the universe just hands you a good one.

While we're busting myths, the original logo's coloured stripes weren't a political statement or a hippy flourish either. The Apple II was the first personal computer that could display colour images on its monitor, and the rainbow logo was there to shout about it.

Worth noting too: the rainbow Apple landed in 1977, a full year before Gilbert Baker's Pride flag debuted in 1978. So despite what people sometimes assume, one didn't inspire the other. They simply share the optimism of the time.

The striped version served Apple for 21 years until 1998, when a returning Steve Jobs replaced it with the sleek monochrome apple that ushered in the iMac era. The shape, though, has barely changed in nearly 50 years.

The bite in the Apple logo is one of our favourite Did You Know? moments because it's such a clean lesson in what design actually is. Not decoration. Not hidden symbolism. A solution to a real problem.

Janoff needed people to recognise an apple instantly, at any size, anywhere in the world. So he reached for the single most universal thing anyone does with one. The result works as well on a phone icon today as it did on a beige box in 1977.

That's the difference between a logo that looks nice and a logo that lasts. One is styled. The other is solved. And solving problems with clarity and craft is exactly what we teach at Shillington.

So next time someone tells you the bite is about Adam and Eve, you'll know the truth. It's just so nobody mistakes it for a cherry.

This is part of our Did You Know? series, where we explore the stories behind the world's most iconic design. Follow along on Instagram for more.