You've probably never heard of Raymond Loewy, but if you drive a car, buy a can of soup, smoke a cigarette, follow picture-only road signs or look advertisements, then Loewy has influenced you. What we expect from the outside of a plane or ship, the color of trademark or the general style and feel of most things in shops can be traced back to the ideas of this Frenchman, who was born in 1893.

Loewy designed the classic Coca-Cola bottle, the supermarket trolley, the Shell and BP symbols and the inside of the Apollo spacecraff. He has designed everything from the Kennedy memorial stamp to the interior of Concorde. When he arrived in New York to make his fortune in 1919 he had a business card with this slogan:
"Between two products equal in prices, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other"
One of his early designs was a refrigerator which looked so attractive yet functional that the eye-appeal became its prime selling point-a factor which has never left the domestic product field. His 1920s' drawing of cars predicted the shapes of the 1980s, and when he sold a collection of his design studies in 1981 he claimed that they were the most remarkable collection of a single person's work since Leonardo da Vinci

the coca cola bottle re-design

the shell logo, 1967

the pecten history from 1900 to today