slankThe launch of the Macintosh PowerBook G3 “Lombard” in 1999 marks a new stylistic direction for Apple television ads and animated movies.

The use of typography is a mainstay of Apple which has used it since the early Eighties to market products and most of all its brand. The ad for the Lombard PowerBook (also known as “Bronze Keyboard”) takes the use of typography even further, marrying images of the laptop with a series of words in many languages (actually the same word and/or concept) alternating and speeding towards the viewer.

This style will be later used not only in promoting the follow-up, the PowerBook Pismo, but will also be part of all the intros to Apple’s operating systems.

pequeñoIn the 1999 ad “slim” and “slank” were Apple’s key words, still set in Apple Garamond as would the similar Mac OS 9 intro.
The last of the “classic” Mac OS also started the “Welcome” ritual which has been used (so far) in all of the Mac OS X intros since 2001 although set in the Lucida Sans and from 10.4 with an added 3D effect.