Dive Brief:
- Google's latest Google Doodle, those occasional illustrations that appear on Google's home page, honors Raymond Loewy, the "father of industrial design. Today would have been his 120th birthday.
- Loewy revolutionized the world of packaging and design—bringing an artists sensibility to hundreds of otherwise mundane items. His most famous work is probably the curvaceous, sensual Coke bottle.
Dive Insight:
Loewy's designs are so ubiquitous as to be invisible, so common that it's easy to miss how little about them is commonplace. Among the Loewy designs closely associated with mid-century American life are the early Greyhound buses, the Studebaker and steam locomotives. He also gave the world the logos of Shell, the U.S. Coast Guard and TWA. He designed Le Creuset cookware, the JFK postage stamp, Lucky Strike boxes and Zippos to light them, etc. But it is the Coke bottle that brought him design immortality. Fittingly, he didn't design the original Coke bottle. The Loewy version was a redesign of an existing bottle. That fits with Loewy's approach to design (and to life)—"never leave well enough alone."