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Designers

A representative starting set across disciplines and eras — not a ranking of “the greatest,” but a foundation the knowledge base grows from.

Architect, furniture designer, and interior architect

Charlotte Perriand

Perriand worked in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier from 1927 to 1937, where she led the furniture program and co-designed the tubular steel pieces that became the studio's best-known objects, including the B306 chaise longue, the Grand Confort armchair, and the B301 sling chair. For decades these were commonly attributed to Le Corbusier alone in marketing and popular accounts, and Perriand's role was recognized in general circulation only much later, though the atelier's own drawings and her own documentation record it. Beyond that period she built an independent practice spanning six decades: wood and rush furniture responding to Japanese craft traditions, prefabricated mountain housing, shelving and storage developed with Jean Prouvé, and the planning and interiors of the Les Arcs ski resorts in Savoie, a project that occupied her from the late 1960s into the 1980s.

Designer, artist, and design educator

Dashrath Patel

Patel was founding faculty and the first secretary of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, established in 1961, and he held that post through the institute's formative decades. Trained as a painter at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Madras and afterward in Paris, he arrived at design from fine art and never confined himself to one medium: he painted, worked extensively in ceramics, photographed, and above all designed exhibitions, producing large-scale displays that presented Indian craft, industry, and culture to audiences in India and abroad. Much of his most consequential work was institutional rather than authored — building curricula, workshops, and a faculty from nothing, and establishing the working relationships with craftspeople, industry, and government that determined what design education in independent India would actually become.

Architect, furniture designer, and lacquer artist

Eileen Gray

Gray built two distinct bodies of work across a long career. The first, from the 1910s and 1920s in Paris, consists of lacquer screens, panels, and luxurious individually made furniture produced in a technique she learned from the Japanese lacquer craftsman Seizo Sugawara, and sold through her own shop, Galerie Jean Désert, which she opened in 1922. The second is architectural and far more austere: the house E-1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, built between 1926 and 1929 with Jean Badovici, and the later house Tempe à Pailla. Alongside these she designed furniture that remains in production, notably the Bibendum chair, the Transat chair, and the adjustable circular side table named for E-1027, each conceived for a specific room before becoming a catalog object.

Graphic designer, art director, curator, and design writer

Kenya Hara

Hara has directed the visual identity and advertising of Muji since 2001, developing a campaign language built on vast landscapes, near-absent copy, and a deliberately unbranded product presentation. He leads Nippon Design Center in Tokyo and teaches at Musashino Art University. Alongside commercial practice he works as a curator and writer, mounting exhibitions that function as arguments rather than displays: Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century in 2000, which asked established designers to reconsider entirely ordinary objects such as a tea bag or a roll of toilet paper, and Haptic in 2004, which asked them to design for touch rather than sight. He designed the official program for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games, and directs the ongoing House Vision project on future domestic living.

Type designer, calligrapher, and design educator

R. K. Joshi

Joshi was a calligrapher, type designer, poet, and teacher who did more than almost any single figure to establish Devanagari type design as a serious discipline in India. He worked for many years in advertising in Bombay, where his lettering and calligraphic work for commercial campaigns brought Indian scripts into a field dominated by Latin typography, before joining the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay as a faculty member, where he taught typography and calligraphy for roughly two decades. In the later part of his career he worked with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune on digital typography for Indian languages. Across these settings he designed a substantial body of Devanagari typefaces and trained a generation of designers who now constitute much of the professional Indian type community.

Industrial designer

Sori Yanagi

Yanagi is central to the formation of postwar Japanese industrial design. He trained in painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, worked as an assistant to Charlotte Perriand during her official visit to Japan in the early 1940s, and founded the Yanagi Design Institute in 1952. His Butterfly Stool of 1954, formed from two identical pieces of molded plywood joined by a brass rod, is held in major museum collections and remains in production. The Elephant Stool of the same year, originally in fiberglass-reinforced plastic, was among the earliest Japanese designs conceived for plastic molding. He also designed stainless steel kitchenware and cutlery that has stayed in continuous production for decades, designed the torch for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, and served from 1977 as director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, founded by his father.

Graphic designer and icon designer

Susan Kare

Kare designed the icons, typefaces, and much of the visual vocabulary of the original Apple Macintosh, released in 1984. Trained as a fine artist with a doctorate from New York University, she joined the Macintosh team in the early 1980s and worked within an extremely tight constraint: one-bit black-and-white displays, with icons defined on grids as small as 32 by 32 pixels. Her output from that period includes the smiling Happy Mac startup image, the trash can, the paint bucket, the watch cursor, the Command key symbol, and the bitmap typefaces Chicago, Geneva, Monaco, and New York. She later served as creative director at NeXT, designed icons for Microsoft Windows and the card deck for its Solitaire game, and has continued to work in interface and product design, including roles at Facebook, Pinterest, and Niantic.