It's certainly not the most interesting period. The development of the Snow White language and the multiple prototypes that never went out hint at what Apple would do in those 20 years. The iMac, iPhone are interesting, but are interesting for the details - the "friendliness" of the first iMacs, the psychedelic ones (the Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power), the sleekness of the iPhone's interface are all details. The pioneering work had already been done and those roads were somewhat explored, some saved for the time we'd have the technologies for it.

For comparison: https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Simple-Early-Design-Years/dp/389...

Yes. A lot of these prototypes were documented in the 1997 book "AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group" by Kunkel and English (now out of print).

https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...

Some images from the book can be found here:

http://www.99mac.se/forum/t/301501-samlarbok-i-nyskick-apple...

Esslinger also wrote his own book called "Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple".

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3897904071

This was not before the Macintosh as the author points out.

Hartmut Esslinger prototyped the "MacPhone" in a study in 1984 after the success of the Macintosh. [1] Other prototypes in this series were part of the Snow White project. [2]

Information sourced from "Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple" by Hartmut Esslinger. [3]

[1] http://imgur.com/MMYDogd [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language [3] https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Simple-Early-Design-Years/dp/389...

No. Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design was hired to prototype a number of different ideas and concepts at Apple.

Project Snow White, as it was called, sought out to create a unified design language for a range of products (and to hopefully catalyze the engineers into creating new product categories).

Susan Kare designed the Chicago typeface in 1984. According to the Esslinger book the "MacPhone Study" was done in 1984 after the release of the Macintosh. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Simple-Early-Design-Years/dp/389...