Frog design inc.

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The correct title of this article is frog design inc.. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

frog design is a creative consultancy founded in 1969 by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger and partners Andreas Haug and Georg Spreng in Mutlangen, Germany as "Esslinger Design". Soon after it moved to Altensteig, Germany, and then to Palo Alto, California, its current headquarters. The name was changed to frogdesign in 1982, then to frog design in 2000. The company has grown to over 325 employees worldwide, collaborating across eight studios: San Francisco, California, San Jose, California, Austin, Texas, New York City, New York, Seattle, Washington, Herrenberg, Germany, Milan, Italy, and as of March 2007, Shanghai.

Originally geared towards industrial design, frog design has expanded their capabilities and now consider themselves a creative consultancy, which also incorporates brand, digital, and user interface design and strategic consulting. Many of their most famous designs are in the area of consumer electronics and computers. In a press release from August of 2004, in what some have characterized as essentially an acquisition, the company announced that Flextronics International, a very large Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider, was taking an equity stake in frog design. Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, in a March 2005 BusinessWeek article, said that Flex was going to integrate their San Jose (CA)-based industrial-design group with frog.^{[citation needed]} The company is now a unit of Aricent (formerly Flextronics Software), which itself is controlled by investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

[edit] Designs and Clients

First designs were for Wega in 1969, a German TV manufacturer, later to be acquired by Sony. frog design continued to work for Sony and designed the Trinitron television set in 1975.

Their first designs for computer manufacturers were for proprietary systems by CTM (Computertechnik Müller) in 1970 and Diehl Data Systems in 1979. More prominent are the designs for Apple Computer, starting with the case of the portable Apple IIc, introducing the Snow White design language used by Apple during 1984-1990, and continued with several Macintosh models. In 1986 Sun's SPARCstations and in 1987 the famous NeXT Cube were designed by frog design.