Americans aged sixteen to twenty-five ranked Steve Jobs, the former Apple CEO, the second greatest innovator of all time, after only the inventor Thomas Edison, per the 2012 Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Invention Index. Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Mark Zuckerberg, and Temple Grandin made the list. Eliot Noyes did not.
A Google Trends analysis of online searches in the last 20 years for Jobs and Noyes suggests that many more people are aware of the iPhone visionary than of Noyes, who consulted with IBM to unify its design and brand. A new documentary suggests that attention must be paid to Noyes.
“Apple took its cues from corporations like IBM to make sure that everything that the company put out was as good as it could be,” Dave Danielson, who worked at Noyes’s firm from 1969 to 1978, says in Modernism, Inc., an NEH-funded film directed by Jason Cohn.
Noyes melded style and function with products like the IBM Selectric typewriter.
—Courtesy IBM
The documentary opens with a woman seated at a desk, in what could be a scene from the AMC drama Mad Men, typing on an IBM Selectric typewriter, “Why should we care about Eliot Noyes?”
Todd Simmons, vice president of brand experience and design at IBM, responds to that admittedly broad question. “Eliot Noyes might be one of the best examples of what it means to be a designer,” Simmons says. Later he adds that “back then, they didn’t have words like ‘marketing’ or even ‘brand.’ They called it all ‘design,’ and they meant everything by it.”
The typewriter upon which the question is composed uses a rotating “ball” with letters rather than individual letter “arms” to strike the paper. That composition allowed for a more sculptural form since the carriage didn’t move. Noyes’s design so revolutionized typing that by the mid-1960s, some 25 percent of working typewriters were estimated to be IBM Selectrics.
IBM Selectrics can be found in collections ranging from the Smithsonian Institution and the Art Institute of Chicago to Museums Victoria in Melbourne. The museum sites identify Noyes as the designer but offer no context or accolades.
If Noyes’s fate of hiding in plain sight today wasn’t foretold, it was at least foreshadowed in his complicated legacy.
“No bigger than a golf ball,” one IBM ad read, the Selectric typeball “prints faster than the eye can see.”
—iStock
The Boston-born Noyes was a “disgruntled” architecture student at Harvard in the 1930s, who rejected the “old fashioned” ideas being taught about formalism and prettying things up. Noyes thought design ought to be practical.
He found mentorship in Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School, who fled Germany and arrived at Harvard in 1937 to teach at the graduate design school. (Gropius wasn’t Jewish but was still “degenerate” to the Nazis.)
Gropius taught Noyes about the Bauhaus approach to design and social reform, according to John Harwood, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto. “Noyes took to that immediately,” Harwood says.
Under Gropius, Noyes learned to see connections between the art, architecture, and design of everyday objects, or Gropius’s “total theory of design.”
At the Museum of Modern Art, where Noyes, at just twenty-nine, became the first director of industrial design, he fought against the stigma of product design as inferior to fine art. He also saw beauty and utility as intertwined.
“In that period of time, in the late ’30s and early ’40s particularly,” Noyes says in a 1973 interview, “we were all sort of bugged on trying to get to things that worked better, and that one way of getting at a better design was not to think up a new decorative trick but to get back to what it was really trying to do.”
Noyes’s mentor, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, believed that design is “an integral part of the stuff of life.”
—National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
He took that notion to great lengths in the exhibition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” which ran from September 24 to November 9, 1941, at MoMA. Noyes exhibited an image of gorillas beside ripped-apart chairs, exposing their inner coils and stuffing.
Those torn-up and exposed parts were “unnecessary over-design that was typically used in those days,” Gordon Bruce, a designer who worked for and has published on Noyes, says in the film. “It’s too heavy and cumbersome, and it swallows up all of your candies and coins and pencils and children in the home,” agrees design historian Alice Twemlow, with a laugh.
Noyes stated his opposition to decorative gimmicks, but, as the documentary tells it, he had tricks up his sleeve and a good deal of luck.
Serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Noyes was assigned to the Pentagon glider program. (5,500 glider pilots got their wings, of the only 1,000 expected.)
Noyes ran the Pentagon’s glider program during World War II and helped to popularize the engineless aircraft.
—Courtesy the Eliot Noyes family
Noyes had trouble getting Pentagon brass, who preferred loud guns to silent gliders, to pay attention to the program. Recognizing that military officials read the comic strip “Terry and the Pirates” regularly, he wrote to the cartoonist Milton Caniff, asking him to include gliders in the story.
The cartoonist agreed and soon illustrated gliders flying over Japanese-controlled areas. The colonels came to Noyes, newspapers in hand, and asked, “Can we do this?”
After the war, Noyes found a job at a design firm working on IBM’s first electric typewriter. When an IBM executive came to see the firm’s work on the typewriter, he recognized Noyes at first sight, the designer’s son explains in the film. “My father looks at him. He looks at my father and says, ‘I know you. You’re the guy who taught me to glide.’”
Noyes didn’t know during the war that he was training Thomas J. Watson Jr., son of IBM CEO and chairman Thomas J. Watson Sr. The younger Watson hired Noyes on a $400 monthly retainer as a design consultant and, after taking over for his dad, Watson offered Noyes a full-time job. Noyes counteroffered with a highly unusual arrangement. He became a consulting director of design from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut.
In a 1941 exhibition, Noyes tore apart the bulky chairs that were in vogue, paving the way for a new, clean-cut style.
—Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
As a consultant, Noyes was able to move between departments, getting involved in everything that the company did—a huge amount of power.
He approached his work with the view that “good design is good business,” and he helped the company understand that, as he put it, all of IBM’s visual statements to the outside world ought to be “as advanced as the machines truly are,” and that design wasn’t about packaging at the end of a process, but a concern throughout everything that the company does.
Good design and good business under Noyes managed to convert skeptics, both as he brought Paul Rand, the American art director and designer, in to redo IBM’s logo and later as he helped other companies, like the Mobil Oil Corporation, overhaul their entire character and brand identity. In so doing, he is credited with laying out the model that Apple and many others would embrace.
Noyes with one of his “Bubble Houses,” completed in 1954 in Hobe Sounds, Florida.
—Courtesy the Eliot Noyes family
Noyes is also known for residential houses, including the one he designed in New Canaan for his family, and corporate structures, such as the IBM building in Garden City, New York. With Paul Rand, he designed the Westinghouse logo, and he and Chermayeff & Geismar Associates designed the Mobil logo. The film also credits Noyes with helping make IBM’s RAMAC, the first personal computer with a “random-access” disk drive, more user friendly.
But just as Noyes was animated as a Harvard student by bringing design into the modern—in this case Modernist—era, the film details the next generation’s reaction to Noyes, whom many younger designers saw as a dinosaur.
The clash came to a head at a gathering of the International Design Conference in Aspen, which Noyes led, in 1970, when new designers and ecological activists from the Bay Area arrived and declared that Noyes and his peers were too cozy with corporations and negligent of more pressing concerns, like protecting the environment.
“In a pure, thorough, clear-sighted way,” his son Eli says, Noyes carved out “a life, a purpose” with his innovative work at IBM.
—Courtesy IBM
Noyes, who eschewed politics, opted to step down from the presidency of the conference. “We’ve had 20 years,” he said. “We are now obsolete.”
Nearly 50 years after his death, Noyes is not a household name like Steve Jobs, but his evangelism for the notion of design as a holistic strategy is so pervasive that, far from being obsolete, many now take it for granted.
