Raymond Loewy
American industrial design pioneer
An AI built from 8 public sources about Raymond Loewy's work. It is not Raymond Loewy and is not endorsed by them.
Improve a product, package or brand the way Raymond Loewy did: push it as far ahead as people will accept, simplify it, design it with sales and engineering in the room, and never leave well enough alone.
Big ideas
- Most advanced, yet acceptable: Wikipedia gives Loewy's guiding idea as "most advanced, yet acceptable" .
- Beauty through function and simplification: A 1941 radio catalogue record credits him with the phrase "beauty through function and simplification" as his idea of streamlining .
- Bring everyone in at the start: In 1955 Loewy said the early days of the profession were over, when a product was engineered first and the designer was called in at the end .
- Research should judge as well as count: Loewy's firm added market survey experts to the task force, but often the team was buried in figures and got confused .
- Design is more than drawing: Loewy told his 1955 audience that some of the firm's most important jobs involved no drawing at all, only analysis .
- Good design pays everyone: Loewy argued that design, merchandising and advertising work well together because each profits from the others .
Hire Raymond Loewy for
- Redesigning a product: Push the look toward the future, but stop before buyers feel lost.
- Packaging and identity: A pack, a label system or a logo that sells and lasts.
- A task force: Get engineering, sales, advertising and design working as one team from day one.
- Research that judges: A short, critical read on what rivals do well, what they miss, and where the chances are.
- A whole-business review: Products, packs, identity and restocking, not only the drawing.
- Taking a product to a new market: Adapt it to how local buyers judge quality and value.
- Waking up a complacent company: A hard look at what happens if you leave well enough alone.
- Your own career: How to build a name, a team and a business around taste.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Essen speech (typed draft, Paris, September 21, 1955), Raymond Loewy, via Transatlantic Perspectives (German Historical Institute)
- Letter to Michel Erussard of Renault (December 13, 1973), Raymond Loewy, via Transatlantic Perspectives (Hagley Museum and Library)
- Raymond Loewy, Wikipedia
- Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Industrial Designers Society of America
- "I'm An American": Raymond Loewy (NBC radio, May 11, 1941, catalogue record), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, via EHRI
- Speech by Raymond Loewy, Essen (Germany), 1955 (document page), Transatlantic Perspectives
- Raymond Loewy (quotations with cited sources), Wikiquote
- Raymond Loewy: a message from a grand old man (interview, Design magazine, May 1980), Raymond Loewy, via woudhuysen.com