| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | (1969) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Key people |
Hartmut Esslinger, Founder Doreen Lorenzo, President Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer |
| Employees | 1,600 (2011) |
| Website | www.frogdesign.com/ |
Frog (styled as frog) is a global innovation firm 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, and ultimately to its current headquarters in San Francisco, California. The name was changed to Frogdesign in 1982 (the name an acronym for Esslinger's home, the Federal Republic of Germany), then to Frog Design in 2000, and finally to Frog in 2011. The company has grown to over 1,600 employees worldwide, collaborating across fifteen locations: San Francisco, Austin, New York City, Seattle, Munich, Milan, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Boston, Chennai, Gurgaon, Johannesburg, Kiev, and Vinnitsa.
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Originally geared towards industrial design, Frog has expanded their capabilities and now call themselves a "global innovation firm" that creates and brings to market products, services and experiences. Many of their most famous designs are in the area of consumer electronics and computers.
In August 2004, the company announced that Flextronics, a large electronics manufacturing services provider, was taking an equity stake in Frog Design, a deal some have characterized as essentially an acquisition. 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.[1] The company is now a unit of Aricent (formerly Flextronics Software), which itself is controlled by investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
Many of today’s design leaders got their start at Frog Design, including Herbie Pfeifer and Paul Montgomery, Tylor Garland, Steven Skov Holt, Jon Guerra, Gadi Amit, Ross Lovegrove, Tucker Viemeister, and Yves Behar.
First designs were for WEGA in 1969, a German TV manufacturer, later 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 continuing with several Macintosh models. The firm designed Sun's SPARCstations in 1989[2] and the famous NeXT Computer in 1987.