Matt Groening's Artwork for Apple | Hacker News Reader

Matt Groening's Artwork for Apple

vintagezen.com

118 pointsshawndumas26 comments

> It’s interesting that The Simpsons have mentioned Apple a number of times, including a parody in the episode 'Mypods and Broomsticks.'

Apple products are omnipresent in the Simpsons nowadays. Whenever there is a tablet, it is an iPad. It makes me quite uneasy.

> Apple products are omnipresent in the Simpsons nowadays. Whenever there is a tablet, it is an iPad. It makes me quite uneasy.

Guess what the Simpsons creators use.

The only time it would be used specifically because it's an Apple would be if Lisa is using or wanting or buying it. That's because Lisa is supposed to come across (now) as the stereotypical Apple user.

>Whenever there is a tablet, it is an iPad.

So basically just like in the real US. Where iPad vs other tablets are like 80-20 or worse...

Cool! I used to have that dorm poster in my dorm. Does that make me old?

I had it too and yes, yes it does.

Ugh. The image viewer hijacks alt-left and -right, i.e., browser back and forward. What were they thinking?

The page also completely broke navigation in my android phone. Not funny.

Very cool find!

But wow From an advertising standpoint that brochure made me cringe.

You can tell neither sides heart is in it - the cartoons are stiff and the corporate copy interspersed feels so forced and out of place - ouch. The end product feels almost like a parody of how terribly out of sync corporate marketing language is with "outsider" comics.

The "dorm" poster, on the other hand, is awesome.

All of the Groenig work in the brochure looks like straight-up "School is Hell" pages.

I own the "The Big Book of Hell" and have looked at it as recently as 5 years ago (although it's with my brother now so I can't check) and I'm pretty sure these are indeed verbatim copies from the "School is Hell" portion.

It's interesting you bring that up, because I thought they were simply lifted from "School is Hell."

I don't know what compilation it showed up in, but the "Bongo's dream dorm" is a re-working of "Bongo's dream house"

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7329/bongosdreamhouse.jpg

...gotta make a buck I guess. Oddly, the Simpsons seemed to give (apparently) free product positioning to Apple over the years.

...and a bit of a roasting now and again, particularly in MyPods and Broomsticks.

Is there ever an HN story that doesn't involve a commentator immediately ripping whatever it was from their own personal mountain of authority -- no matter what the subject?

I enjoyed the ad copy. Moreover, I found it really interesting to see what Apple felt their target market cared about at the time, and what Apple saw as the solution.

>You can tell neither sides heart is in it

No, actually you can't. Any specific examples?

I had that poster, hanging in my dorm. It was indeed awesome. Sadly, it did not wear well so I was eventually compelled to throw it away.

Agreed. Long form ad copy, just not done anymore.

> And whatever you create on the Macintosh screen will look just as good when you print it on an Apple ImageWriter® II printer.

Did they ever use one of those things? I feel the urge to laugh uncontrollably.

This at a time when printing from, for example, a non-WYSIWYG WordPerfect document on a a PC would print your entire doc in whatever printer font you had installed and selected. Seems crazy now, but printing to an ImageWriter from a Mac was a huge step up, poor DPI notwithstanding.

Yeah, I used one back in school. It had a 'letter quality' mode which looked like a million bucks compared to the typical Epson monospaced dot-matrix printout. Probably subtly nudged up my GPA.

It was actually a "near letter quality" mode -- two passes of 9 pins, slightly shifted. That is unless you had the fancy 24-pin Imagewriter LQ

The Imagewriter had twice the DPI of the Mac screen so I don't think they were overselling it. WYSIWYG was a big deal at the time and it did what it said.

Remember this is a time when macs still did not display vector fonts (Adobe Type Manager just came out in 1989 and was not free) and of course there was no antialiasing because it was a 1 bit display.

Wow. I think I still have that brochure somewhere, in a box that's survived two colleges, four apartments, and a house.

Wow! Looks like Apple has always been on this mixing tech with liberal arts thing!!

The blog post appears to have been removed.

it's back

Reply on news.ycombinator.com