The Google Doodle in honour of industrial designer Raymond Loewy
Internet search giant Google is marking the 120th anniversary of the birth of industrial designer Raymond Loewy with a pencil drawing-like Google Doodle on its homepage.
The static doodle – a stylised Google logo – is of a sleek train that carries the word ‘Google’ in its design, similar to the K4s Pacific #3768 locomotive covered in a shroud Loewy had designed.
Loewy, known as the ‘father of industrial design’, created slick designs for not only trains, but also cars, fridges, spacecraft, electric razors, and the slimmer Coca-Cola bottle.
He also designed logos for Shell, Exxon, Nabisco, Greyhound, Chubb Corp, and the US Postal Service.
So prolific was his work across various industries that Time magazine featured Loewy on its cover on 31 October 1949.
Loewy was born in Paris, France, on 5 November 1893, and spent most of his professional seven-decade career in the US.
In his early years in New York, he designed department store windows and worked as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines.
He received his first industrial-design commission in 1929, to contemporise the appearance of a duplicating machine by Gestetner.
Loewy retired at the age of 87 in 1980 and returned to France. He died on 14 July 1986, in Monte Carol, Monaco, at the age of 92.
