The Design That Shaped How We Live: A Visual Guide

Seventeen years of chairs, typefaces, soup cans, sneakers and the shapes that hang from the ceiling. This is our love letter to design.

Most of the world you touch today was designed by someone. The chair under you, the letters on this screen, the little walking man who tells you when to cross the street. Somebody sat with each of those things longer than seemed reasonable, and that is why they work.

We have spent since 2009 collecting the people who did that sitting. Some of them are famous enough to need one name. Calder. Rams. Warhol. Abloh. Plenty of them are not famous at all, like a grandmother in Germany who builds wheelchair ramps out of LEGO. This guide is for all of them.

One rule before we start: buildings live in their own guide. Everything else that people have shaped with intent is fair game here, from a pocket radio to a font to a ramp outside a shop in Hanau.

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01 · Things That Move

Patron: Alexander Calder

Before Alexander Calder, sculpture sat still and waited for you to walk around it. Then in the early 1930s he hung a few painted shapes from wire, balanced them against each other, and let the air do the rest. Marcel Duchamp gave the things their name: mobiles. They have never stopped moving since, and neither has anyone who saw one as a kid lying on the floor under a crib.

Calder came from a family of Philadelphia sculptors. His grandfather made the William Penn on top of City Hall, his father made a fountain down the parkway, and in 2025 the city finally opened Calder Gardens to the grandson. Three generations along one parkway!

His idea, that design could be about balance and time instead of mass, runs straight through the kinetic work we keep featuring. SpY’s nine rotating rings. Tom Lawton’s slow brass machines. Studio Drift’s flock of lights rising and falling over a crowd. A desk weather station called Skymill that turns the forecast into a little metal ballet. And Theo Jansen’s strandbeests, which walk down Dutch beaches on wind alone and are the closest thing Calder has to grandchildren.

02 · Less, But Better

Patrons: Dieter Rams and Jony Ive

Dieter Rams ran design at Braun for more than thirty years, and he boiled everything he knew into ten principles and three words: less, but better. His radios and record players had no ornament at all. Every knob was where your hand expected it, and color showed up only where it helped, a small accent on the one button that mattered.

Forty years later a young British designer named Jony Ive pinned that thinking to the wall at Apple. You can hold a 1958 Braun T3 pocket radio next to the first iPod and see the conversation between them. We wrote about his legacy the week he left, and we have kept following him since: a clock with no hands and a sailing lantern for Balmuda, and now the inside of a Ferrari.

The idea keeps finding new homes. Teenage Engineering makes synthesizers that look like they were designed by a very serious child. Muji built a whole company on things without logos. And somebody took Rams’ rules and redrew a dozen modern gadgets as Braun might have. They look calm. Getting there took Rams a whole career.

03 · The Soup Can Problem

Patron: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol started out drawing shoes for newspaper ads, and he never quite stopped. In 1962 he showed thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, one for every flavor, and the art world had a very long argument about whether that was allowed. It was. He had noticed that the supermarket shelf was the most looked-at gallery in America, and that the people designing labels were already making pictures millions of people knew by heart.

Which makes packaging the most democratic design there is. A ketchup bottle that shows you the perfect pour. A bottle that ignores every branding rule on purpose. A designer in India who reduced famous brands to plain, single-color packaging, just to see how much of the brand survived. Warhol would have liked all of it.

His soup cans became skateboard decks, his foundation put pop color on Gufram’s famous cactus, and Claes Oldenburg spent a career making the clothespin and the spoon so big you had to look at them. The pop artists did not invent everyday design. They just made us notice we were living inside it.

04 · In Quotation Marks

Patron: Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh trained as a civil engineer and then studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in the building Mies van der Rohe designed. It shows. He thought about clothes the way architects think about structure, and about culture the way DJs think about records: as something you sample, remix and hand back.

His rule of thumb was to change an existing design by about three percent. A Nike sneaker with the word SHOELACES printed on the laces, in quotation marks. A rug for IKEA that says KEEP OFF. The quotation marks told you the object knew exactly what it was, and asked you to look again.

He was the first Black American to lead menswear at Louis Vuitton, and he died in 2021 at 41, still in the middle of everything. One of the last things he worked on was a two-seat Maybach concept built like an off-road toy. His door is still open: Yinka Ilori brings the color and parables of his Nigerian heritage to North Face jackets, Fabian Oefner takes sneakers apart in midair, Nicole McLaughlin makes shoes out of volleyballs, and Iris van Herpen grew a dress out of living algae.

05 · Letters With Feelings

Patrons: Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, Milton Glaser and Paul Rand

Massimo Vignelli believed that if you could design one thing, you could design everything, and then he went and did. With Bob Noorda he gave the New York subway its signs, and in 1972 Vignelli drew its famous map of straight lines and clean angles. He designed the American Airlines logo. With his wife Lella he designed stacking melamine dinnerware in 1964 that won the Compasso d’Oro and went into the collection at MoMA. It is still in production.

Type is the quietest kind of design and the most persuasive. Paul Rand’s logos for IBM and UPS taught corporations what a mark could do. Milton Glaser drew I ♥ NY in the back of a taxi, the story goes, and gave it away for free. Paula Scher sketched the Citi logo on a napkin in her first meeting with the bank, and later explained that drawing it took seconds and learning to draw it took thirty-four years. We wrote about Glaser when he died on his 91st birthday, and Imaginary Forces made a tribute film to Rand we still go back to.

Closer to home, Aaron Draplin draws thick lines out of a studio across town in Portland and co-founded Field Notes. Typefaces keep surprising us too: Helvetica got its first rebuild in decades, and a Finnish newspaper released a font that melts in step with the Arctic ice.

06 · Signs for Strangers

Patrons: Otl Aicher and Shigetaka Kurita

Some design has one job: talk to someone who does not speak your language, in under a second, while they are moving. For the 1972 Munich Olympics Otl Aicher drew a family of stick figures on a strict grid, one for every sport, and the world has been borrowing his people ever since. Every airport bathroom sign owes him something. We traced the whole story in a century of Olympic design.

In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita drew 176 tiny pictures, twelve pixels square, for a Japanese phone company. They were called emoji. Today there are thousands of them and MoMA owns his originals. Somebody even measured every emoji to scale, from mosquito to galaxy.

And then there are the signs you see every day without seeing them. Maya Barkai collected the walking men of the world’s crosswalks, from Warsaw to Cape Town, and Tokyo’s has a fedora. Europe is voting on what its next banknotes look like, and the reason its bridges were never real bridges is a lovely piece of design diplomacy. A stamp is the same idea at postage size.

07 · The Chair Is a Self-Portrait

Patrons: Charles and Ray Eames

Every designer eventually designs a chair, and every chair gives the designer away. Charles and Ray Eames bent plywood into the shape of a sitting body, then did it again in fiberglass and aluminum and leather, and somewhere along the way made films, toys, exhibitions and the best short documentary about scale ever made, Powers of Ten. Their rule was that the details are not details. They make the design.

Hans Wegner drew close to five hundred chairs. Verner Panton wanted a chair poured in one piece of plastic, and it took until 1967 for anyone to figure out how to make it. Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis group arrived in 1981 and threw a party in the middle of all that good taste, and designers are still printing lamps in their honor.

Vitra made a whole documentary about it, Chair Times, and we recommend it to anyone who has ever stood up from a seat and looked back at it. The newest chapter belongs to IKEA, which needed twenty prototypes and a tractor tire to make an inflatable chair worth sitting in, and to Joe Doucet, who wants his furniture to last a thousand years.

08 · Designed to Be Played

Patrons: Gunpei Yokoi and the LEGO brick

Gunpei Yokoi had a phrase for how he worked at Nintendo: lateral thinking with withered technology. Use old, cheap, proven parts in a way nobody expected. His Game Boy had a tiny green screen that was already out of date in 1989, and it ran for days on four AA batteries while its flashier rivals ate theirs in hours. It sold by the tens of millions. LEGO later built a full-size brick version and we have not stopped smiling about it.

The LEGO brick itself is one of the great designs of the century. The version patented in 1958 still clicks into bricks made today. The company’s name comes from the Danish for play well, and they mostly have: braille bricks so blind kids can build alongside everyone else, a wooden line for grown-ups, and a smart brick that has fans both excited and a little nervous.

Toys are design with the stakes turned up, because a kid will tell you the truth. Eddy Goldfarb invented more than eight hundred of them, including the wind-up chattering teeth, and he was still at it past one hundred. Japan’s handmade playgrounds look even better at night. And a new board game built its whole structure around a single galloping horse.

09 · Machines We Fell For

Patrons: the concept car designers

Cars are where design gets to show off. In 1955 Citroën rolled out the DS, and the critic Roland Barthes wrote that it looked like it had fallen from the sky. The concept cars that followed are the closest thing industrial design has to science fiction: Bertone’s wedge-shaped Lamborghini Athon, the Citroën Karin with its driver sitting in the very middle of a glass pyramid, and the Golden Sahara II, which had glowing tires and a cocktail bar.

Marc Newson designed a small, sweet Ford concept in 1999 that still looks like the future, and more than twenty five years later he and Jony Ive spent five years on the inside of Ferrari’s first electric car. Volkswagen is chasing the old XL1 dream of going farther on less, and Citroën’s SM got a tribute that made us want the seventies back.

This chapter is also a little personal. In 2023 we asked what cars might look like if the great architects had designed them, and our architect cars traveled further than almost anything we have made. It turns out a lot of people have wondered what Zaha Hadid would park in the driveway!

10 · The Invisible Ones

Patron: Susan Kare

In 1983 Susan Kare sat down with a sheet of graph paper and drew the original Macintosh icons one square at a time: the smiling computer, the trash can, the little bomb. She designed the fonts too. Most people who clicked those icons never learned her name, and they never had to. The best design is often the kind you only notice when it is missing.

That goes double for design that lets more people in. The curb cut was won by wheelchair users in Berkeley in the 1970s, and now every parent with a stroller and every traveler with a rolling suitcase uses it without a thought. The same idea is all over our archive: a grandmother in Germany building wheelchair ramps out of LEGO, a 3D printed bionic arm, an all-terrain wheelchair that Zion National Park now lends out for free, and a chair that hugs people with autism when the world gets loud.

Sometimes the invisible fix is about joy. The grand piano went three hundred years without a real redesign, until the Ravenchord. And Toyota built a wheelchair that walks! We will take more of all of it.

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Design questions, answered

What counts as design?

Anything shaped on purpose for people to use, read, wear, sit on or find their way with. In this guide that means products, type and logos, packaging, furniture, fashion, toys, cars, signs, interfaces and accessible design. Buildings have their own guide.

Who invented the mobile?

Alexander Calder made the first hanging mobiles in the early 1930s in Paris, and Marcel Duchamp suggested the name. Calder kept refining them for the rest of his life.

What does less, but better mean?

It is Dieter Rams’ summary of his ten principles of good design: remove everything that is not essential, then make what is left as good as it can be. His work at Braun shaped generations of product designers, including Jony Ive at Apple.

Why did Virgil Abloh use quotation marks?

Abloh used quotation marks to show an object was aware of itself, as in a shoelace printed with the word SHOELACES. It was part of his idea that changing an existing design by about three percent could make people see it new.

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Keep Exploring

That is the tour, and it is nowhere near the whole archive. We have written more than 2,600 design stories since 2009, and we keep finding people who sat with a thing longer than seemed reasonable.

If a word in here tripped you up, Bauhaus, Memphis, kerning, that sort of thing, The Glossary of Visual Culture & Design has it, and the Reference Library has the makers behind the furniture and the glass, from Charlotte Perriand to Hans Wegner.

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By Moss & Fog Staff