The Museum of Modern Art holds object 150.2005: the GEM Paperclip, 1899, steel, gift of the manufacturer. It credits two designers. One is a British company with no company registration, no trade...
The Monobloc is the world’s most common chair. The cheap white plastic stacking chair found everywhere on Earth. Roughly a billion of them exist, at weddings, roadside cafés, schoolyards and refugee camps...
For most of the early 1960s, Verner Panton drove around Europe trying to persuade someone to manufacture a chair. Fifteen manufacturers turned him down. One well-known American designer said the thing shouldn’t...
In 1968, Herman Miller launched Action Office. It made the company hundreds of millions of dollars, transformed how most of the world works, and is still for sale today. The man who...
In September 1981, Ettore Sottsass sat in a taxi in central Milan and assumed a bomb had gone off. The street was blocked by a crowd of a thousand people. They were...
In 1986, Steve Jobs paid Paul Rand $100,000 to design a single logo, and took the one option Rand offered, without changes. By then, Rand had already given America some of the...
In 1954, Olivetti bolted a typewriter to a sidewalk on Fifth Avenue and hung a twenty-three-meter sculpture on the wall behind it. This is how an Italian company that treated the way...
In 1982, Susan Kare was welding a life-size razorback hog for a museum, with no background in computer graphics. A year later she was designing the icons, typefaces, and the smiling startup...