(obituary)
The Age
Wednesday January 25, 1995
Brooks Stevens, 83, industrial designer.
BROOKS STEVENS was the pioneering industrial designer whose works ranged from corporate logos to clothes dryers. He was a founder of the industrial design business in the 1930s, along with men like Raymond Loewy, who designed the Coca-Cola logo, and John Vassos, who modernised the appearance of radios.
In later years, Stevens recalled how difficult it was to persuade companies to pay him to redesign their products during the hard times of the Depression. ``In the '30s I had to fight my way in to talk to anybody," he said. ``I had to not only justify myself, but justify my profession."
Gradually he convinced manufacturers to engage him, often with memorable results. The front mudguard design he did for the 1949 Harley- Davidson Hydraglide motorcycle is still used today by the company in its Heritage Classic series.
One of his early successes was with a prototype clothes dryer developed by engineers at Hamilton Industries in Wisconsin. At the time, the only way to dry clothes was to hang them on a line.
Hamilton's engineers had developed a metal box with an electric motor driving a drum inside and a gas-fired heater. The device was featureless except for an on/off switch.
``You can't sell this thing," Stevens, who has died aged 83, recalled telling the developers. ``It's just a sheet metal box."
Stevens suggested putting a glass panel in the front and loading it with the most brightly colored boxer shorts the manufacturer could find and showing it off in department stores. Modern clothes dryers still follow the same basic layout.
``He did everything from cigarette lighters to pavement rippers," said Gary Wolfe, curator of the Brooks Stevens Gallery of Industrial Design at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. ``His speciality was to make products more user-friendly."
Stevens worked for a total of 585 clients, designing everything from lawnmowers to outboard motors to the civilian Jeepster after World War II.
He designed the corporate logo for Miller beer and persuaded the company to use clear bottles, rather than the traditional brown, to go with its advertising slogan ``the champagne of bottled beer".
Cars were a favorite of Stevens, who both designed and collected them. He designed a two-seat sports car called Excalibur for the ailing Kaiser-Frazer company in 1964, and later formed a company to produce cars bearing that name that had styling vaguely reminiscent of a 1930s Mercedes-Benz.
Stevens also designed the last prototypes for Studebaker, including a station wagon with a sliding roof to permit hauling of tall objects.
The cars were never produced, but the prototypes wound up in the Brooks Stevens Car Museum in Mequon, Wisconsin along with the 75 antique cars he had collected.
He was born in Milwaukee, the son of the director of development for the Cutler-Hammer Corporation, which made industrial control units.
While suffering from childhood polio, he taught himself to draw and his party piece was to draw simultaneously two perfect circles with left and right hands. He studied architecture at Cornell but turned to designing at the time of the stock market crash.
In 1944, along with Raymond Loewy and eight other men, he helped form the Industrial Designers Society of America. Today the society has thousands of members. Stevens turned the design company over to his son Kipp in 1979, but continued to lecture and teach.
© 1995 The Age