Type Private CEO Harry West Founded 1969 Parent organization Aricent | Area served Worldwide Founder Hartmut Esslinger Number of employees 600 | |
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Industry Design firm, Consulting, Innovation strategy, Industrial design, Interaction design, Software engineering Key people Harry West
(Chief Executive Officer) Owner Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States Profiles | ||
Frog (styled as frog) is a global design and strategy firm founded in 1969 by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger 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 apparently originating from an acronym for Esslinger's home country, the Federal Republic of Germany), then to Frog Design in 2000, and finally to frog in 2011.
Contents
Evolution
Originally geared towards industrial design, frog has expanded its capabilities and is now a global product strategy and design firm. Many of its designs are of consumer electronics and computers.
In August 2004, the company announced that Flextronics International, a large electronics manufacturing services provider, was taking an equity stake in the company, a deal characterized by some commentators as essentially an acquisition. Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, in a March 2005 BusinessWeek article, said that Flex was going to integrate their San Jose-based industrial-design group with frog. The company is now a unit of Aricent (formerly Flextronics Software), which in turn is controlled by investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
Many of today’s design leaders started at frog, including Herbie Pfeifer, Paul Montgomery, Tylor Garland, Steven Skov Holt, Anaal Udaybabu, Jon Guerra, Gadi Amit, Ross Lovegrove, Tucker Viemeister and Yves Béhar.
Designs and clients
First designs were for WEGA in 1969, a German radio and television manufacturer, later acquired by Sony. frog continued to work for Sony and designed the Trinitron television receiver 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 and the NeXT Computer in 1987.
More recently, frog has worked for clients such as SAP, General Electric, Microsoft, Siemens, Intel, Lufthansa, Hewlett-Packard, and UNICEF.
Corporate
The company has over 600 employees worldwide, with offices and clients across the globe. In the US, frog has offices in San Francisco, Austin, New York City, Seattle, and Boston; in Europe, Munich, Milan, Amsterdam, and London; in Asia Shanghai and Singapore; and in Australia Sydney .