Remembering Raymond Loewy: Lessons from the Father of Industrial Design

Raymond Loewy designed the Lucky Strike cigarette pack, the Coca-Cola vending machine, the Shell logo, the Greyhound bus, and the interior of Air Force One. He also coined one of the most useful concepts in design history: MAYA.

Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

The idea is deceptively simple: people are drawn to things that feel familiar enough to be comfortable, but novel enough to be exciting. Push too far into the future and you lose them. Stay too close to the past and you bore them. The sweet spot — the MAYA zone — is where great design lives.

Why this matters more than ever

In an age of infinite choice and shrinking attention, the MAYA principle is not just a design heuristic. It's a business strategy.

Every brand decision — from a logo refresh to a product launch to a campaign — is a negotiation between the familiar and the new. Between what your audience already loves about you and what you need them to believe about your future.

Get it wrong in either direction and you pay a price. Too conservative and you're invisible. Too radical and you're alienating.

Loewy's other lesson: beauty is not optional

Loewy believed that good design should be beautiful as a matter of principle — not as a luxury, but as a responsibility. He once said: "The most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph."

It's a line that sounds cynical until you realise what he actually meant: that beauty and commercial success are not in tension. When you design something truly well — something that respects the user, solves the problem elegantly, and has the confidence to be aesthetically considered — it performs better.

This is the Łofnheim thesis. The arts and the sciences are not separate disciplines. They are the same discipline, seen from different angles.

What we remember

Loewy died in 1986, but his fingerprints are everywhere. Every time a brand asks "how do we modernise without losing ourselves?" — that's a MAYA question. Every time a designer fights for the beauty of a solution that could have been merely functional — that's Loewy's legacy.

We remember him not for any single object, but for the idea that design is a conversation between what is and what could be. And that the designer's job is to make that conversation irresistible.