In my opinion, there are few companies that have really used design for their benefit. Design is an asset that most companies will mess around with, but never really fully commit to a strong vision of design excellence. Olivetti is one of those companies that invested in design. Here is a flickr archive of some of their older work.
If you are a book junkie, you have run into Wiedler before. From what I understand it is basically run by one person, Felix. Regardless of who is running it, they have an insatiable appetite for old design books. I believe this to be the best design archive of it’s type.
Modernist graphic design is a bit spooky, as ethos goes. As well-meaning as its ideas of societal efficiency seem, most of its figureheads believed in the fallacy of visual “neutrality”, a feat of mental gymnastics that reveals either careless cynicism or genuine misanthropy. If design for mass transit most neatly summates Modernist thought, down to form, then the work of Margaret Calvert & Jock Kinneir for Britain’s road system is one of the very few examples I could use to posit a healthier alternative to design curricula’s Old Guard.
As investigations of career and explanatory tone go, these readings are well worth their time –
Margaret Calvert & Jock Kinneir at the Design Museum
“…you go through life and you have responses to certain kinds of experiences, smells, looking at things, touching things, and you have certain kinds of responses. Some are very intense and some are less intense, and some bring you to a kind of immediate awareness of what’s going on and a clarity of vision or a clarity of understanding the nature of things, and others are pretty much ignored and passed over. And as an artist, I think you can traffic in those kinds of ideas. You can take those experiences and make objects which give other people similar kinds of experiences.”
“…one comes to perfection of what he wants through the accumulations of multiple failures. To arrive at a convenient solution one has to doubt until finally uncovering the structure that confirms and conforms to the concepts that one has of art, or at least what one thinks is art”
