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HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

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The Complicated Legacy of Eliot Noyes

A new film revisits the pioneering IBM designer.

Menachem Wecker

HUMANITIES, Spring 2025, Volume 46, Number 2

Photo caption

Noyes’s vision was simple: “Good design is good business.”

—Courtesy the Eliot Noyes family

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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.<br>“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.

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Noyes melded style and function with products like the IBM Selectric typewriter.

—Courtesy IBM

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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?”<br>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.”<br>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.<br>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.<br>If Noyes’s fate of hiding in plain sight today wasn’t foretold, it was at least foreshadowed in his complicated legacy.

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“No bigger than a golf ball,” one IBM ad read, the Selectric typeball “prints faster than the eye can see.”

—iStock

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“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.<br>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.)<br>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.<br>Under Gropius, Noyes learned to see connections between the art, architecture, and design of everyday objects, or Gropius’s “total theory of design.”<br>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.<br>“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.”

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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

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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,...