2008 AIGA Medalist: Clement Mok

When the internet changed the business world, Mok changed his business, too, transforming CMd into the interactive agency Studio Archetype. Within a year his head count had grown to more than a hundred and revenues to more than $20 million.

With the new economy came a demand for new business models. Seeing that opportunity, Mok combined Studio Archetype with global consulting firm Sapient in 1998, contributing hundreds of millions to the bottom line and proving that strategic design brings enormous wealth to business.

Mok, meet Mac

If you use a Mac, thank Clement Mok. Mok was instrumental in conveying the Mac sensibility that endures to this day, that here is a friendly, simple computer anyone could use.

Following the launch of the Apple II, III and the Lisa, CEO Steve Jobs had come to understand the need to create a brand experience at the highest level of quality. Tom Suiter, fresh from his work on Mercedes-Benz for Landor Associates, was brought in and tasked with developing an in-house team to lead Apple's branding and corporate marketing. “To do that, I had to get the best people,” Suiter recalls. “And in the early 1980s, getting them to leave New York City for an office in Cupertino next to the Shell station, well, that was a stretch.”

The best Suiter could find? Clement Mok. After stints at CBS and Donovan & Green in New York, Mok, who had graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, was primed to return to California. “What Clement understood was how a brand was much more than a logo—how everything you design permeates the process of customer experience. Every step of opening the box of the original Macintosh was beautiful,” says Suiter.

Mok's first project as newly minted art director was to set the graphic standards for the original Macintosh user manuals in 1983. One manual in particular, for MacPaint, was a gem of clarity and a personal favorite for Mok. What he conveyed in those manuals was nothing less than a sea change in the way we would look at technology. Technology was no longer signified by HAL, the scary mainframe from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was friendly, empowering, and it would change your life.

In January 1984, Mok left the Mac team and became art director for Apple Corporate, helping to launch the Apple IIc and leading the design for all event marketing and corporate communications—including a string of award-winning annual reports. When Jobs exited the company in 1985, Mok also became responsible for design for the education market, which then comprised a third of its revenues. He was all of 27 years old.

As Tom Hughes, the former Apple creative director and Mok's boss, remembers, “Even as a young designer, Clement went into each project with an artful sense of design and expressed a wonderful fluency through his work. Above and beyond the work, Clement's personality was remarkably graceful under pressure. He carried a serenity and presence—I don't know how else to put it—that was angelic.”

Mok's work for the Mac became the de facto design standard for Apple. Hugh Dubberly, a creative director at Apple during the early years says, “There was a time, for a year or two, when Clement knew everything there was to know about using a Macintosh. Literally.”

In addition to making the technology understandable, Mok's biggest achievement, according to Dubberly, was “getting computers into the hands of designers.” At the International Design Conference in Aspen, Mok and the Apple team would set up their computers, and demonstrate HyperCard, desktop publishing and on-demand badge-making, while design leaders and other notables such as Henry Wolf of Esquire, Frank Stanton of CBS and David Hockney strolled through. “It was,” Dubberly says, “incredible exposure for computers at a time when computers were frightening. For many designers, Clement provided their first hands-on experience with computers.”