Overview
Walter Landor
(1913—1995)
Quick Reference
(1913–95)
Walter Landor was a leading corporate identity and brand design specialist, his most celebrated clients including Coca‐Cola, Fuji Films, Levi Strauss, Philip Morris, Twentieth Century Limited, and the World Wildlife Fund. Born in Munich in 1913 he moved to London in 1931 to complete his studies at Goldsmiths College of Art. In 1935 he was a founding member of Industrial Design Partnership, one of Britain's first industrial design consultancies, in the following year becoming the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1939 he moved to the USA, establishing Landor Associates with his wife Josephine in San Francisco in 1941. The firm established a reputation for packaging design and the creation and coordination of corporate identity. For Landor, the creation of corporate identity involved consumer research, business analysis, and strategic planning, an outlook that established the firm as a leading international consultancy with seventeen offices worldwide by the late 1980s, offering a wide range of design services, including corporate identity and environmental design. In addition to the clients listed above the company's identity designs included those of a number of airlines, including Alitalia, British Airways, Thai International, and Singapore Airlines. Reflecting his status as a major American design consultant whose work had a significant impact on everyday visual experience, in 1994 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington established the Walter Landor Collections of Design Records and Packaging.
