Regis McKenna

里吉斯麥肯納

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，就是要將硅谷杰出的公關人員里吉斯·麥肯納招至麾下。麥肯納來自匹茲堡的一個工人階級大家庭，外表的魅力掩蓋了他骨子里的冷酷堅韌。大學綴學的他曾先后供職于仙童公司和國家半導體公司，后來創辦了自己的公關和廣告公司。他有兩項專長，一是把對他的客戶進行獨家專訪的機會留給自己熟識的記者，二是策劃令人難忘的廣告方案，為諸如微芯片這樣的產品提升品牌知名度。其中有為英特爾打造的一系列色彩絢爛的雜志廣告，以疾馳的賽車和撲克籌碼為主要元素，取代了以往枯燥的性能圖表。這些引起了喬布斯的注意。他致電英特爾公司詢問廣告的設計方。他被告知了這樣一個名字：里吉斯·麥肯納。“我問他們里吉斯·麥肯納是什么，”喬布斯回憶說，“他們告訴我是一個人的名字。”喬布斯打去了電話，卻未能直接與麥肯納通話。他的電話被轉給了一個叫做弗蘭克·伯奇（FrankBurge）的業務經理，此人只想把喬布斯打發走。之后，喬布斯幾乎每天都會打來電話。

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.”

最終伯奇同意了，驅車前往喬布斯的車庫與之會面，他回憶起自己當時的想法：“天哪，這個人肯定是個怪胎。我跟這個小丑待在一起的時間越短越好，但是又不能顯得無禮。”之后，當他見到邋里邋遢、不修邊幅的喬布斯時，有兩件事觸動了他。“第一，他是個異常聰明的年輕人；第二，他侃侃而談的東西我一句都聽不懂。”

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.”

于是喬布斯和沃茲尼亞克獲邀去拜訪“麥肯納，本人”——他的名片上就是這么寫的。這一次，一貫羞澀的沃茲尼亞克變成了刺兒頭。麥肯納瞥了一眼沃茲正在寫的關于蘋果公司的文章，提出文章的技術性太強，需要修改得生動一些。“我不想任何公關人員碰我的稿子。”沃茲惡狠狠地說。麥肯納于是讓他們離開了自己的辦公室。“但史蒂夫立刻給我打了電話，說他想再跟我見一面，”麥肯納說，“這一次他是一個人來的，我們聊得很投機。”

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.”

麥肯納讓自己的團隊為AppleII設計宣傳冊。團隊要做的第一件事就是換掉羅恩·韋恩設計的維多利亞木版畫風格的華麗標志，因為它不符合麥肯納色彩斑斕、活潑頑皮的廣告風格。于是，藝術指導羅布·雅諾夫（RobJanoff）被指派去設計一個全新的標志。“不要設計成可愛風格的。”喬布斯命令。雅諾夫想出了兩個版本，都是筒單的蘋果圖標，一個是完整的蘋果，另一個則是被咬了一口的蘋果。第一個看上去太像櫻桃了，于是喬布斯選擇了第二個。喬布斯還挑選了另一個版本，其中的蘋果由六種顏色的水平色條構成，在大地的綠色和天空的藍色中間夾著另外四種炫麗的顏色，但這一版本的印刷費用也因此大大提髙了。在宣傳冊頂端，麥肯納放上了一句格言，這句話被普遍認為出自列奧納多·達·芬奇（LeonardodaVinci）,也成為了喬布斯設計理念的決定性準則：“至繁歸于至簡。”