Your Design hero's / inspirations

Who are your hero’s and inspirations in your industry?

I’ll put mine into a few personal categories, an incomplete working list:

The Architects:
Eliot Noyes
Charles Eames
Eero Saarinen
Achille Castiglioni
Arne Jacobsen

The Founders:
Raymond Loewy
Walter Dorwin Teague
Brooks Stevens
Norman Belle Geddes
Jacob Jensen

The Practitioners:
Richard Seymour and Dick Powell
Hartmut Esslinger
Bill Mitchell
Dieter Rams
Giorgio Giugiaro

Walter Gropius
James Dyson
Yves Behar
Chris Bangle

Aesthetics wise, something attributed to the following individuals usually makes an impression on me:
Arne Jacobsen
Zaha Hadid
Ross Lovegrove
Marc Newson
Jasper Morrison
Naoto Fukasawa

My design heros - those who designed the products I love and use everyday - are usually nameless . I don’t care much either, knowing that designers quite often claim (or get) far too much credit for anything successful on the market. Kinda like the iPod clickwheel is wrongly attributed to Jony Ives.

But cant we attribute it to Steve Jobs?

My dad
Louis Sullivan
Koen de Winter
Prof. Paul Rothstein

I can be inspired by the work attributed to some of the other names, but I can’t say I’m inspired by the designers. I don’t know them or how they work. Therefore, my list is made up of people that I know to some degree, other than Louis Sullivan. I keep running across stories about Sullivan that inspire me, so I’ll give him the credit for that.

Newton
da Vinci
Michelangelo
Mendel
Einstein
Giacometti
Tesla/Edison

I realize that Giacometti really doesn’t fit in with that crowd. It’s more of a personal indulgence.

Luigi Colani

Massimo Vignelli
Arne Jacobsen
Jan Tschichold
(can I be cliché and add Jonathan Ive? And Le Corbusier?)

…my head is frozen. I’ll add more when they reappear :wink:

Kenya Hara
Lebbeus Woods
Scott Wilson (even before KS)
Marc Newson
Santiago Calatrava
Tadao Ando
Herzog & de Meuron (the de Young museum in SF)

I seem to get a lot more inspiration from architecture than from ID. There is much more written/printed about buildings and the practice of architecture; this is probably due to the permanence and large-ness, rather than just this season’s new gadget/brand/trend.

For a life commitment to total design: the duo of Antoni Gaudi and Josep Jujols, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The first industrial designer, and still the most impressive, Leonardo daVinci.

Maurits Escher because “All art is regular division of the plane.” and “Perspective: my best friend and my greatest enemy.”

I am constantly motivated by nameless and faceless designers toiling away on no-profile projects that show brilliant design in unlikely products and unexpected locations.

a un sung hero Jim Hall the creator of so many system’s, aspects and even look of modern racing (and some production cars too) cars.

Michael Jager. JDK.

Only met him twice, but his talk at a conference I attended flipped my thinking completely.

On how he evaluates work, “Would I steal it?” I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to the point I’d steal something I’ve made, but I’m sure trying.

D.