The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design

A new book celebrates the legacy of Eliot Noyes, whose work at IBM, Mobil Oil, and Westinghouse led the way for future designers

by Jessie Scanlon

• View Slide Show

It is hard to overstate the achievements of Eliot Noyes. It is harder still to explain why the designer and architect, who died in 1977 at age 67, isn't better known today, when the principles he championed—the notion that good design is good business, for instance, and the belief in interdisciplinary design teams—are now accepted wisdom.

Every designer working in or for Corporate America today owes Noyes a debt of gratitude, for it was Noyes who, in the '50s and '60s, built the first corporate design programs at IBM (IBM), Westinghouse, Mobil Oil (XOM), and Cummins Engines (CMI).

Yet in the design world broadly, and even within the organizations Noyes worked with so closely, his legacy isn't always appreciated. IBM's design chief, Lee Green (whose full title is vice-president, IBM brand values and experience), is keenly aware of Noyes's contribution to IBM's design history.

"Noyes laid the foundation of the design program that is still in place today," says Lee. "He also brought in the team of consultants who together were responsible for all of the visual expressions of the brand—everything from visual identity to architecture to publications to advertising and product design."

But Lee admits that it's a "smaller number of IBMers" who are aware of Noyes. While his design of the Selectric typewriter (which dominated 75% of the market four years after its introduction) and the logo he hired Paul Rand to create are well-known, few could name the man responsible.

Treasure Trove of Material

But this month, a new monograph by Gordon Bruce titled Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism (Phaidon Press 2007, www.phaidonpress.com) aims to reestablish Noyes' legacy and bring his impressive achievements to a wider audience. Bruce, who worked as a designer in the Noyes office for close to a decade, offers an intimate portrayal that is as much about the man as it is about the work. The result is a book that not only profiles one of the most influential American designers of the 20th century but tells the story of the dawn of design in Corporate America.

Granted complete access to Noyes's files by his widow, Bruce draws on private journals, professional correspondence, project archives, and photos. "Eliot was a fastidious record keeper," says Bruce. "The archive filled about 100 file boxes and three times that in slide boxes."

Those boxes contained not just all the correspondence between Noyes and the chief exeuctive officers that he worked directly with but also speeches by those CEOs, such as Thomas J. Watson Jr.'s 1973 lecture at the Wharton School of Business in which he used the phrase "Good design is good business." As Bruce points out, the phrase had appeared in several of Noyes's notebooks years earlier.

Bruce begins his story with Noyes's early years and his education at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where the young architect came under the influence of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who fled Germany in 1937, bringing the modernist ideals of the Bauhaus School with them. But the author moves quickly to the early years of Noyes's career when, after a brief stint working in the office of his mentors, he became the first curator of design at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Design into Production

The position gave Noyes a platform to promote his vision of good design, as well as the work of modernist designers including Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, and Marcel Breuer. All four submitted designs to the museum's "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition, the genesis of a 1941 exhibition.