5 design Icons

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lissa
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Apple have completely taken the technology market in a new direction I feel with their minimalist and functional design even if they do charge extorsionate prices (he says from his MacBook Pro :lol: )

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The beginning of a revolution in personal gaming

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In my opinion the coolest clothing brand out there at the moment

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The company responsible for setting the trend in freely available personal automotive transport

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Amazing amplifiers that are surprisingly unknown and underrated
 
The Alden Indy boot:

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Although maybe not an icon, the new NP bottle is beautiful:

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shmogt
...a city can be a design icon as it is the same thing. Vegas is full of flashy lights, casinos, and hookers to attract people to go there and waste all there money. Paris has fancy foods, good wines, and gorgeous landscapes again to attract tourist to go there and spend there money.
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But Vegas is merely a collection of advertising hordings. Las Vegas basically started off with a few flashy buildings when electricity became cheap and easy enough to use, and then everybody else had to design bigger and more gaudy in order to compete.

But using Las Vegas as a counter-arguement is not valid. The point I was trying to make about a town or village not being a design icon is because the town was not designed as a whole; the buildings may have had architecture, either as an individual entity or as a collective to ensure uniformity, but there is no total infrastructure designed from the start, it has been edited and altered to fit the increase in size. I'm not saying buldings cannot be design icons on their own, or as a collective. I'm merely saying that a whole town or village, in my opinion, cannot be a design icon because it was never designed that way.

I'm not trolling, nor am I suggesting that one persons viewpoint is wrong if it differs from mine. I just don't think that the town can hold it's own on a worldwide scale when compared to an individual building.
 
I'll agree I can't see calling an entire city a design icon - parts of it absolutely, but a whole city? Seems too much. Then again, this is an opinion-based idea, so it's not one person's place to deem others' choices inappropriate. And it certainly isn't the place for name-calling.

Five I could come up with, though I did try to avoid repeats (minus that last one):

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The 33 Stradale has always been my favourite Alfa, and I don't see that ever changing. Almost named the Vanquish instead - I always felt it was the nicest of the modern Astons, and it really set the tone for proportions for every grand tourer that followed.

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A "fashion" watch instead of the more traditional watch makes, but there's something about the ceramic...

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I mean this in no disrespect to the lives lost, but the WTC was not a great design icon. The Chrysler building? It's what I think of when I think of giant NYC buildings.

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Mmmmm, Eames.

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You can love it. You can hate it. But it's all over, especially if you count the influenced and the imitators.

(NINJA-EDIT) Oh, Omnis reminded me. Bonus one:

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Yeah, even though I absolutely hate chucks, they are definitely iconic.
 
Lol what you think these cars you post about are designed by one person and had it planned for years into the future too. I'm not calling you a troll your opinion is fine, but a city starts off small and grows into a bigger one just like any other company. A bunch of people design elements of it to make it better.
 
shmogt
Lol what you think these cars you post about are designed by one person and had it planned for years into the future too. I'm not calling you a troll your opinion is fine, but a city starts off small and grows into a bigger one just like any other company. A bunch of people design elements of it to make it better.
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But it's 99% of the time random. There is no method to the placement of buildings other than "ok, here's some free space let's put it here" or "let's demolish these structures and put in something new." Yes, cars and other things are designed by multiple people, but the key point is it's all designed to be one single entity. As I stated in my post that was removed for no reason and could have just been mod edited to remove the quoted post which I can understand removing, the only way a city can be considered a design icon is if its layout was designed by an individual or group of individuals. And I mean the entire layout.
 
A city planner. You can't just say let's build a building here you have to go threw so many steps with the government and if they say ok this building would suit our city it is made. Like I mentioned before with Vegas having lots of casinos. If I was a business man looking to open my own casino I wouldn't go the a small town in ohio. They don't just let anything be built it's all planned out. Aka designed for a purpose.
 
It still isn't an icon of design. It's the end product that makes these things design icons. If you change something, chances are it would become something else. A Ferrari (insert model) is that model because of how it looks. If it was designed differently but named the same, then what we know as that model would also change. Say, if a 458 was designed to look like a 430, and there was no 430, then we wouldn't know what a 430 was. If someone made a 458 look like a 430 and there was a 430, then the 458 wouldn't be what it is. With a city it doesn't matter how it looks, it's always going to be that city. Take your example of Vegas, the Vegas of today and the Vegas of 50 years ago are completely different, yet it's still Vegas and everyone knows that. It's each individual component that makes a city iconic, not it's design save for a few. Your analogy of a casino in Ohio is a poor one. Small towns are small towns and cities are cities for a host of different reasons. You wouldn't put a casino in a small town because it wouldn't make much business sense, not because of planning. I could give you a handful of examples of casinos being built in a city just for the sake of generating revenue. You're confusing two very different things. Being designed does not make something iconic, and being iconic does not mean something was designed. I might as well claim the Grand Canyon or the White Cliffs of Dover are design icons.
 
Here are mine...

The Mini. (The original, not the fat BMW imitation.)
This car revolutionised small car design and has tons of personality.
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The Jaguar XJ-Series.
This is the perfect embodiment of British luxury combined with ultra-cool style.
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The Spitfire.
It looks and sounds glorious and it was a significant factor in winning WW2.
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The Subaru Impreza WRX STI. (The original, not the current one.)
It's an icon of rallying and I've always loved it.
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The MGB.
This is an iconic sports car and looks perfect. :)
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The Nissan Elgrand: The mother of all luxurious vans.
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Bang & Olufsen Beovision 5: Simply the best looking TV on the market.
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Audi Forum, Aoyama: Great piece of architecture. I'd love to see it in person.
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Dōgo Onsen: Bathhouses like these are some of the most beautiful buildings in the world.
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Arne Jacobsen's "Swan": Stunning peace of furniture with an equally stunning pricetag
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To me your points make it even more of a design icon. People know what it's all about even if you make changes. Vegas now and 50 yrs ago are still about the same thing even tho everything looks different. Ferrari 50 yrs ago everything looked different, but there still about the same thing now even tho the fleet of cars are different. A design icon to me is something that changes the way we live forever. A city is designed for certain purposes and each one is good for something different. Look at Dubai with all of its rich oil money people building every possible cool thing there is. Only one of those buildings can be a design icon? All them together I think makes a bigger impact. The style of Ferrari was because of Italy. If Italy didn't do things with a certain way and have it's only style to inspire them the cars would look totally different.
 
I think your definition of 'design icon' is a bit too loose shmogt, cities can feature iconic design but they aren't design icons as a whole. Usually, when people refer to an icon, they refer to the singular and the static: cities always have an inherent multiplicity and dynamism to them as they're comprised of several districts that feature several architectural styles which were influenced by several different views on aestheticism and function, and this creates a superstructure that is constantly in flux with the times. Cities aren't designed with a spec in mind. Design icons are, which is why buildings can be classed as such.
 
I do get your point but buildings are designed for a certain city. You choose where you want to build your building based on what other buildings the city has to offer. You would call the monalisa a design icon and you could also call the museum it is in one too. It is the same as a beautiful building only the museum it is in happens to be a city. They both contain amazing works of art.
 
The Mona Lisa isn't a design icon, it serves no purpose other than to exist as an artwork. An architect designing a building to take into account its environment is again, conforming to a spec set by a brief. The development of a city over time does not conform to a brief, it is moulded by the socioeconomic desires of its inhabitants. Cities are shaped at their most basic unit, the building, and if that building is designed well then it influences further developments. They are an example of an ever ongoing design process: London in the 14th century looks nothing like London today, and London today will have little similarity to London in the future. Design icons withstand time due to their effectiveness at fulfilling a need, to use my examples, the Leica was a perfection of the small format camera and Helvetica is the perfection of a neutral typeface. Tell me, what purpose does a beautiful city like Paris serve, and why is it such a design icon that makes it so much better than other cities which I assume serve a similar purpose that Paris does? There are features of cities that are examples of good design, and perhaps could be seen as iconic (the grid system for laying out road for example), but a city as a whole cannot be seen as a design icon as its form is the result of random change.
 
SlipZtrEm
I mean this in no disrespect to the lives lost, but the WTC was not a great design icon. The Chrysler building? It's what I think of when I think of giant NYC buildings.
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I think the WTC is a great design icon because of it's plain simplicity.
 
shmogt
I do get your point but buildings are designed for a certain city. You choose where you want to build your building based on what other buildings the city has to offer. You would call the monalisa a design icon and you could also call the museum it is in one too. It is the same as a beautiful building only the museum it is in happens to be a city. They both contain amazing works of art.
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Being designed for a purpose or space is not the same as being a design icon. The layout plan of most cities is roughly the same square block design with some main streets every so often. That is not a design icon, it's done that way to be functional. Going back to the Vegas and casinos theme you used before: Take Vegas, replace all the casinos with typical city buildings like banks and office buildings and smaller less flashy hotels. The city loses its iconic image and becomes just another city. Now take Vegas as it is and instead of the main strip turn it into a triangular arrangement. It's still Vegas, and it's because of the buildings that make it up. The entity as a whole is what makes things design icons. You could change the building placement in NYC but it would still be NYC. Start moving elements of a logo or a product and they're no longer representative of that thing.
 
Alright you guys have won me over. I think I'm mixing culture/design than pure design icon. However I think you could say 1950 Vegas was a design icon as it will never change and you like the way it is all layed out and everything it has to offer. What about people tho as I said they would be considered designed icons as they are designed by many etc (read my first post).
 

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