Iconic Designs: 50 Stories About 50 Things

by Grace Lees-Maffei (editor)

Iconic Designs is a beautifully designed and illustrated guide to fifty classic 'things' – designs that we find in the city, in our homes and offices, on page and screen, and in our everyday lives. In her introduction, Grace Lees-Maffei explores the idea of iconicity and what makes a design 'iconic', and fifty essays by leading design and cultural critics address the development of each iconic 'thing', its innovative and unique qualities, and its journey to classic status. Subjects range from the late 19th century to the present day, and include the Sydney Opera House, the Post-It Note, Coco Chanel's classic suit, the Sony Walkman™, Hello Kitty™, Helvetica, the Ford Model T, Harry Beck's diagrammatic map of the London Underground and the Apple iMac G3. This handsome volume provides a treasure trove of 'stories' that will shed new light on the iconic designs that we use without thinking, aspire to possess, love or hate (or love to hate) and which form part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2014

About the author

Grace Lees-Maffei is a Professor of Design History and Director of the Professional Doctorate in Heritage (DHeritage) at the University of Hertfordshire. Grace's published work is available in The Design History Reader (Berg 2010), Writing Design: Words and Objects (Berg 2012), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury 2013), Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945 (Routledge 2013), Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Bloomsbury 2014), Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Berghahn, 2016), Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Design and Heritage (Routledge 2022) and in journals including Design Issues, Design and Culture, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Women's History Review, Modern Italy and the Journal of Design History.
Prof Lees-Maffei is Book Series Editor, with Prof Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo), for Cultural Histories of Design (Bloomsbury), and Advisory Board member for AIS/Design Storia e Ricerche, Journal of the AIS/Design (Associazione italiana degli storici del design).

Reviews

[Jeff Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iconic Designs: 50 stories about 50 things was for the most part interesting. Each of the 50 objects are depicted in a color photo and given 3 pages of history. The "Iconic Designs" ranged from simple everyday objects to the unusual and uninteresting. Some stories you are bound to have heard before (3M post-it notes), many were interesting (graphic user interface, and several left this reviewer wanting more (Swiss army knife, Palm Islands in Dubai). However several missed their mark. I skimmed or skipped altogether Wedgwood's Portland Vase, Benneton ad champaign, the Strawberry Thief, and the Princess telephone. Three pages was about all I could stand reading about Barbie or the mobility scooter, but if you want to learn more about the cover to St. Pepper, the London Eye, or Rubic's Cube, you might look elsewhere.