Regis McKenna

里吉斯麦肯纳

The first step in this process was convincing the Valley’s premier publicist, Regis McKenna, to take on Apple as a client. McKenna was from a large working-class Pittsburgh family, and bred into his bones was a steeliness that he cloaked with charm. A college dropout, he had worked for Fairchild and National Semiconductor before starting his own PR and advertising firm. His two specialties were doling out exclusive interviews with his clients to journalists he had cultivated and coming up with memorable ad campaigns that created brand awareness for products such as microchips. One of these was a series of colorful magazine ads for Intel that featured racing cars and poker chips rather than the usual dull performance charts. These caught Jobs’s eye. He called Intel and asked who created them. “Regis McKenna,” he was told. “I asked them what Regis McKenna was,” Jobs recalled, “and they told me he was a person.” When Jobs phoned, he couldn’t get through to McKenna. Instead he was transferred to Frank Burge, an account executive, who tried to put him off. Jobs called back almost every day.

新公司成立后的第一件事，就是要将硅谷杰出的公关人员里吉斯·麦肯纳招至麾下。麦肯纳来自匹兹堡的一个工人阶级大家庭，外表的魅力掩盖了他骨子里的冷酷坚韧。大学綴学的他曾先后供职于仙童公司和国家半导体公司，后来创办了自己的公关和广告公司。他有两项专长，一是把对他的客户进行独家专访的机会留给自己熟识的记者，二是策划令人难忘的广告方案，为诸如微芯片这样的产品提升品牌知名度。其中有为英特尔打造的一系列色彩绚烂的杂志广告，以疾驰的赛车和扑克筹码为主要元素，取代了以往枯燥的性能图表。这些引起了乔布斯的注意。他致电英特尔公司询问广告的设计方。他被告知了这样一个名字：里吉斯·麦肯纳。“我问他们里吉斯·麦肯纳是什么，”乔布斯回忆说，“他们告诉我是一个人的名字。”乔布斯打去了电话，却未能直接与麦肯纳通话。他的电话被转给了一个叫做弗兰克·伯奇（FrankBurge）的业务经理，此人只想把乔布斯打发走。之后，乔布斯几乎每天都会打来电话。

Burge finally agreed to drive out to the Jobs garage. “Holy Christ, this guy is going to be something else,” he recalled thinking. “What’s the least amount of time I can spend with this clown without being rude.” Then, when he was confronted with the unwashed and shaggy Jobs, two things hit him: “First, he was an incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t understand a fiftieth of what he was talking about.”

最终伯奇同意了，驱车前往乔布斯的车库与之会面，他回忆起自己当时的想法：“天哪，这个人肯定是个怪胎。我跟这个小丑待在一起的时间越短越好，但是又不能显得无礼。”之后，当他见到邋里邋遢、不修边幅的乔布斯时，有两件事触动了他。“第一，他是个异常聪明的年轻人；第二，他侃侃而谈的东西我一句都听不懂。”

So Jobs and Wozniak were invited to have a meeting with, as his impish business cards read, “Regis McKenna, himself.” This time it was the normally shy Wozniak who became prickly. McKenna glanced at an article Wozniak was writing about Apple and suggested that it was too technical and needed to be livened up. “I don’t want any PR man touching my copy,” Wozniak snapped. McKenna suggested it was time for them to leave his office. “But Steve called me back right away and said he wanted to meet again,” McKenna recalled. “This time he came without Woz, and we hit it off.”

于是乔布斯和沃兹尼亚克获邀去拜访“麦肯纳，本人”——他的名片上就是这么写的。这一次，一贯羞涩的沃兹尼亚克变成了刺儿头。麦肯纳瞥了一眼沃兹正在写的关于苹果公司的文章，提出文章的技术性太强，需要修改得生动一些。“我不想任何公关人员碰我的稿子。”沃兹恶狠狠地说。麦肯纳于是让他们离开了自己的办公室。“但史蒂夫立刻给我打了电话，说他想再跟我见一面，”麦肯纳说，“这一次他是一个人来的，我们聊得很投机。”

McKenna had his team get to work on brochures for the Apple II. The first thing they did was to replace Ron Wayne’s ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo, which ran counter to McKenna’s colorful and playful advertising style. So an art director, Rob Janoff, was assigned to create a new one. “Don’t make it cute,” Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a simple apple shape in two versions, one whole and the other with a bite taken out of it. The first looked too much like a cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also picked a version that was striped in six colors, with psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-earth green and sky blue, even though that made printing the logo significantly more expensive. Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

麦肯纳让自己的团队为AppleII设计宣传册。团队要做的第一件事就是换掉罗恩·韦恩设计的维多利亚木版画风格的华丽标志，因为它不符合麦肯纳色彩斑斓、活泼顽皮的广告风格。于是，艺术指导罗布·雅诺夫（RobJanoff）被指派去设计一个全新的标志。“不要设计成可爱风格的。”乔布斯命令。雅诺夫想出了两个版本，都是筒单的苹果图标，一个是完整的苹果，另一个则是被咬了一口的苹果。第一个看上去太像樱桃了，于是乔布斯选择了第二个。乔布斯还挑选了另一个版本，其中的苹果由六种颜色的水平色条构成，在大地的绿色和天空的蓝色中间夹着另外四种炫丽的颜色，但这一版本的印刷费用也因此大大提髙了。在宣传册顶端，麦肯纳放上了一句格言，这句话被普遍认为出自列奧纳多·达·芬奇（LeonardodaVinci）,也成为了乔布斯设计理念的决定性准则：“至繁归于至简。”