Steve Jobs on why he paid $100,000 for the NeXT logo

November 03, 2025

In 1986, Steve Jobs paid designer Paul Rand $100,000 to design the logo for NeXT Computers.

Paul Rand was a celebrated designer who had created logos for Esquire, IBM, UPS, and ABC. He accepted Jobs’s offer on one condition: there would be no revisions. Rand would design the logo, and Jobs would pay. If Jobs didn’t like the logo, he didn’t have to use it.

“When we were starting our quest for what our corporate identity was going to be, a person that we had in house gave me a few of [Paul Rand’s] books and articles to read,” Jobs explains. “I got up to speed on who he was and the immense body of his work . . . He was the only one we approached, and he said he’d love to do it.”

Jobs elaborates on what made Rand great and why logos are important for companies to get right:

“He solved a very difficult problem for us. The problem that he solved was that most company logos are just logotype. And every once in a while, a company has a logo that’s sort of a little jewel — a symbol — that can be used independently of the logotype. At Apple we had such a symbol. In fact, at Apple it was very rare because the symbol was a thing that had the same name as a company.”

He continues:

“It usually takes 10 years and $100 million to associate a symbol with the name of a company. Our challenge was, How could we have a little jewel that we could use without the name to put on the product? . . . And Paul solved that by making us a little jewel that had contained in it the name of the company. He really approached it as a problem that had to be solved, not an artistic challenge for its own sake.”