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A Product Designer Who Made Mid-Century America Look Clean and Stylish (smithsonianmag.com)
79 points by ycombonator on June 7, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


I'm a big fan of articles that that use lots of photos and illustrations interspersed throughout the text as examples.

Sadly, this article is not one of those. It describes many of Loewy's designs, but only has photos of a couple of them.


Had he been alive to see it, this dude would have fallen out of his chair the day CAD software got NURBS.


Those who played the Fallout video games series (e.g. 3 or 4) will recognize this aesthetic.


1 and 2 have the same aesthetic. You just see less of it because they're RPGs.


XCOM: Apocalypse also took this aesthetic and ran with it all the way into the future.

https://youtu.be/2CUYps6AOZ4


Disappointed with lack of images in the article.


He (and/or his employees) was by no means the first to have or apply these ideas, though. There was Bauhaus, and before that Dutch De Stijl and Russian constructivism. The article is really lacking context.


There’s nothing new under the sun. That’s a phrase many on HN and in tech in general need to remember. In most cases, being first at something is almost completely irrelevant.

There are things that matter far more, such as execution, timing, adapting, salesmanship, etc. This guy happened to have the right combination of these things at the right time.


Agreed. Creating demand, a market for your product, and executing on delivery are key.


Well, these ideas actually were new around 1900-1930, and very influential even without Loewy.


You just have to look at Apple in the 2000's - they didn't invent MP3 players or smartphones, but they certainly created the first truly viable generation of each product.


Or maybe the time was ripe and it was just luck.


I was going to say “Loewry who?”.

Cultural bias I guess.




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