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I read Raymond Lowey’s book Never Leave Well Enough Alone. Raymond Lowey, for those who don’t know, helped products move from the stark, bland assembly line type product to products that you would proudly show off in your home. He was a master at taking anything from refrigerators to trains to cruise liners and made them not only look really good, but also made them “feel” really good. You could say he helped put ‘design’ in industrial design.

This got me thinking about the parallels of industrial design history and the history of web design. If you trace industrial design back to it’s earliest days “the prime objective was to make the contraption - whether a coffee grinder, or lifting crane, or a steam engine - work.” The result was “the country became flooded with products.” Sound familiar? Remember what the web was in the mid-1990s?

Then, for industrial design, came “well-meaning” artists. As the book describes it, “with total disregard for the fundamentals of the problem, i.e., the improvement of the product itself, they started on their task of embellishment”. Some of the results of this era in industrial design were trains covered with garlands of roses, steam rollers with pink angles and stoves covered with quails and butterflies. As Lowey describes it, this marked the the age of “decalcomania”. Wow! It’s almost scary how similar this sounds to when web design was considered graphic designers mocking up a skin for a website in Photoshop and pasting the JPGs into table cells. Talk about decalcomania!

Then there was Raymond Lowey. He used design to make things people enjoyed having in their lives. The products he helped design were overwhelming successful, both in sales and in the response of the people who were using them. Just look at some examples. Lowey fought his whole life to make products not only look amazing but to feel just right and work just like people wanted them to. Are we entering the Lowey Era of web design? Is this what Web 2.0 is? I hope so!

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