This book is the first biography of artist and industrial designer John Vassos. The book positions him as a significant figure in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s into the postwar period. The big four founders of the profession have received ample attention, but Vassos, who was a key pioneering figure, has primarily been forgotten. Vassos deserves scholarly attention as he was the only prewar industrial designer to specialize in designing for the then emergent mass media of radio and television. The book creates a complex portrait ... More

This book is the first biography of artist and industrial designer John Vassos. The book positions him as a significant figure in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s into the postwar period. The big four founders of the profession have received ample attention, but Vassos, who was a key pioneering figure, has primarily been forgotten. Vassos deserves scholarly attention as he was the only prewar industrial designer to specialize in designing for the then emergent mass media of radio and television. The book creates a complex portrait of an artist and designer whose early illustration work criticized the commercialization of modern life but whose later design work took for granted those same qualities and attempted to accommodate people to them. The book relies on unpublished records and correspondence to trace in detail the evolution of his ideas about modernity and the design process. Vassos was the Radio Corporation of America’s key consultant designer through the rise of radio and television and even computing, including the design of the "first" tv set, as such his work reveals how designers created shapes for media tools which have no prior form.