Contents
Preface
Introduction: Creating Design We Can Live With
1. Drawing Modernity: Advertising and Book Illustrations
2. Becoming an Industrial Designer
3. Modernizing the Home through Radio
4. Designed for Electricity: Vassos’s Architectural Interiors
5. Vassos and RCA: Money, Media, and Modernism
6. The TRK-12: RCA’s First Mass-Marketed Television Receiver
7. John Vassos in Postwar America
Conclusion: The Legacy of John Vassos
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Danielle Shapiro is an independent scholar who has served as
senior program officer in the Division of Public Programs at the
National Endowment for the Humanities. She earned her PhD in art
history and communications studies from McGill University.
"Danielle Shapiro makes a convincing case for John Vassos's
formerly unheralded, but highly significant, early contributions to
the field now known as user interface (UI) design. The chapters
about Vassos's design of knobs, dials, displays, and casings for
RCA radios and studio recording machinery are especially
illuminating. Furthermore, the book is beautifully written; the
illustrations, almost all 'new', are aptly chosen; and the
footnotes are a rich source of information not only about Vassos
but also about twentieth-century design in general."—Carma Gorman,
The University of Texas at Austin
"John Vassos is a complex portrait of an artist and designer whose
early illustration work criticized the tempo and commercialism of
modern life but whose later design work took for granted those same
qualities and attempted to accommodate people to them."—Jeffrey L.
Meikle, University of Texas at Austin"In the first complete picture
of John Vassos, Danielle Shapiro definitively captures an
industrial designer of the first rank."—Russell Flinchum, North
Carolina State University"John Vassos energized the flow of
products, people, and media with his streamlined designs for
everything from kitchen appliances to turnstiles and radios.
Danielle Shapiro has created an original portrait of this important
designer and this key period in American design and popular
culture."—Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
"A compelling account."—The Art Bulletin"John Vassos, Industrial
Design for Modern Life is not only an essential book for designers,
but for those who love the history of design."—The Arts Fuse"Not
simply the first biography of a designer who was a major
contributor to the design of consumer electronics but also a solid
examination of the evolution of consumer and industrial design
during Vassos’s lifetime."—CHOICE"An expertly researched
biography."—Journal of Design History
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