The Most Hated Designer of the 20th Century

Luigi Kolani might be the most influential designer you've never heard of. He designed a car that got 138 miles per gallon in 1981. He created some of the wildest concepts anyone had ever seen. And yet the design establishment hated him so much that one university even banned students from his exhibitions. Why did the design world both despise and obsess over Luigi Kolani so much? To understand that, you have to understand where designers come from. People think design schools teach creativity, but what they often teach is conformity. Most designers are trained in a strict philosophy of rational minimalism. Every week, your work goes up on the wall and gets picked apart by classmates and professors. So, you're discouraged from taking big risks. A lot of designers come out of that system restrained and cautious, terrified of stepping outside of the guidelines. But Luigi Kolani wasn't trained in traditional product design. He studied sculpture and aerodynamics. And that nonconformity really shows. This was and to a large degree still is considered the pinnacle of design. Meanwhile, Colani was making stuff like this. Biomorphic shapes inspired by sea forms and the curves of the human body. And it went beyond the work. When most designers looked like this, Colani looked like this. Colani and his work feel outrageous even today. So imagine how insane this all must have looked when it first came out 40 years ago. They don't like me. Especially Germany is a country where you have to be obedient to everything. They are all like margarine uh cubes that you can put poof puff in a shelf. — If you are a ball, you're out of the game here. — And that's what I am. — In one case, Colani showcased his work at a gallery in a small German city. But instead of a warm welcome, he was ridiculed by the local design school professors. The professors even banned students from attending the Colani Gallery and said they would fail anyone who disobeyed. This was decades ago, but I spoke with a student who went to this school and he told me, "If you mention Colani as an inspiration, it will be immediately dismissed as biomorphic bullshit. " That's 40 years later. The design establishment didn't take Colani's work seriously, but to young designers, he was like the forbidden fruit. Yes, his work was often impractical and bombastic, some of its ugliest sin, but it was also very unrestrained and fresh. Even though junior designers were impressed by his courage to make wild concepts, no one wanted to hang up work for critique and have their boss say, "It looks too much like that Colani crap. " But before you start feeling too bad for Kolani, remember a lot of the hatred towards him was kind of understandable, like this quote. Luigi Kolani was the sensation of that stupid exhibition because nothing new was there. That sounds like someone hyping him up until you realize that the person who said that was Luigi Kolani. He was reviewing himself there. Kolani was insanely arrogant. And it gets worse. — The stupidity is so overwhelming. You can't imagine. They're too stupid. Plain stupid. — He called Raymond Loey, one of the most celebrated designers of the 20th century, a charming prince of American ugliness. And here's one of my personal favorite Colani quotes. The world is super stupid. You have by far the best designers in America, and you do the most stupid cars in the world. They put billions into their stupid designs for General Motors, Chrysler, Buick, or who knows what. The designers in America must be frustrated. I am not frustrated because I am not a designer. I am a philosopher and all philosophers have said for ages that the world around them is stupid. Even though Colani was extremely arrogant, there was a reason for it. If you're going to be making designs like this, while the rest of the design establishment is praising stuff like this, you need to be outspoken and confident. Colani built an entire persona that bolstered his ideas. He had a big cigar in hand, custommade white clothes, giant stash. It was all part of this image that he had crafted. Whether you loved Kolani or hated him, one thing is undeniable. He was impossible to ignore. The whole thing bordered on performance art. Nothing appeared out of character or outside his WWF wrestler persona. He'd say the most outrageous stuff in the most passionate way. I am convinced that good design has a profound influence of the people living inside and that's the thing I'm aiming at frantically. — And then he'd also turn around and say crazy stuff like this. — Hello America. I'm a very famous designer and in my castle in south of France I have 35 cats and for the last 20 years I am the designer with the most and biggest experience

in cat life and we designed this machine for you and if you like to help engage in the things. Thank you. Everything about his image was crafted, even his name. His real name wasn't Luigi, it was Lutz. He claims that his real name was always Luigi, but wartime bureaucracy in Germany forced him to switch to a more German sounding name. Maybe that's true, but I'm skeptical. What is certain is that he was German. He was not Italian. Changing the name to Luigi reads a lot more like a branding play since Italians stereotypically have a reputation for expressive creativity. He designed the image of Luigi Kolani as much as he designed the objects. All of this careful image crafting created an insane cult following. I mean, the guy had his own action figure. Colani has a lot in common with modern spectacriven public figures and influencers. He invented the playbook 50 years ago in my opinion, but he was far more ethical, far more qualified, and far less harmful than his modern-day counterparts. Many designers thought that Colani's arrogance and crazy designs made a mockery of the profession. And because of that, most companies in Europe and the US didn't really want to work with him. So, how did he get so famous? Even though the design establishment didn't like him, there are several reasons, but a lot of it is encapsulated in this one story. In the mid1970s, Colani bought a brand new Ferrari Daytona, and this is where Colani is truly unique. Rather than just enjoying his beautiful new car like a normal person, Kolani looked at this meticulously designed handbuilt vehicle and said, "I think I can do better. " So, he redesigned the entire exterior body and this Ferrari plus dustbuster hybrid looking thing as a result. I'm not into it, but it takes a lot of courage to redesign one of the most admired cars in the world. And I respect that on some level. It's like someone looking at a Rembrandt painting and saying, "Yeah, I can make it better. " and just painting over it. Even if you're as skilled as Kolani, the lack of regard for established tradition is kind of insane. In this case, he failed to improve the design. But if you're going to push things forward, you have to take risks. — This time we are living in is afraid. Afraid of going ahead. — If you take risks, you're going to fail a lot more often. You can't be afraid. I'm almost certain Kolani bought this car with his own money and the entire project was self-funded. Colani came from a very wealthy family. Remember the castle with 30 cats in it? Yeah, European castles aren't cheap and I can't even imagine what the heating bill must have been. It's easy to dismiss Colani as an obnoxious castle dwelling rich guy. I get it. But really ask yourself, if you never needed to work a day in your life, would you spend all that time working long hours and fighting the design industry for decades on end? Most of us would probably just buy the Ferrari and enjoy it rather than spend months redesigning it. If a path looked interesting to him, he could take it, even if it meant ruining a masterpiece to try a new idea. Kani created over 5,000 designs throughout his career. He was a very dedicated designer who continued honing his craft until the very end of his life. That insane volume of concepts showed that he did have a lot to say as a creative person. Before we get further into the video, I want to talk about incogn. There's an entire industry of data brokers quietly collecting and selling your information. Your name, address, phone number, email, sometimes even court or financial records. That's why you get these creepy, hyper specific spam calls and emails and why your home address shows up on random websites. Technically, you can ask these companies to delete your data, but there are hundreds of them, and doing it yourself is basically a part-time job. And that's where Incogn comes in. They do it all for you. They track down your personal data across data brokers, directories, and commercial databases. They send removal requests on your behalf, and they even follow up over time to make sure it doesn't pop up again. For one-off sites, you can use their custom removal feature. Send them the link and a privacy expert handles it for you. They're also the first and only personal data removal service independently verified by Deote to actually remove data from hundreds of broker sites and track confirmed removals. Take your personal data back with Incogn. Use code design theory at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan. Back to the video. Money bought Colani Creative Independence. He didn't need a committee's permission or a client's sign off. Ferrari didn't pay him to design this. He did it because he wanted to, and he had total creative control. He did often take outside commissions, but if the client didn't agree with his vision, he could walk away without worrying about how he'll pay the rent. Business always rewards order, control, and predictability. And Colani just didn't have to play by those rules. It was all emotion and biomorphism and eroticism. Of course, the downside of having nobody to keep you in check is obvious. Some designs were really bad or really stupid. But

the upside is that he had books full of concept that just keep getting more and more outrageous the deeper you go. So yes, he was the arrogant rich guy, but he also did the work and stood by the results, whether they were beautiful or not. Design is treated like it's only supposed to be beautiful and functional. Don't touch the complexities of human nature or desire. Just sand off the rough edges and pretend that nuances don't exist. And whatever you do, never make something ugly or impractical. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design. Nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. We view people as obedient and predictable users and consumers. Designers are terrified of breaking the rules of what is in good taste. You color inside the lines, sell the safe thing, and call it a day. A lot of modern designers have pushed their creative aspirations away in service of aligning with corporate profits. They're all dreamers in denial. But not Colani. Just look at this office chair he designed. It's very cool and very useless. There are no pictures or videos of anyone getting in and out of this chair because that would expose how difficult and awkward it would be. There's nowhere to place tools like pens and extra paper. It would be impossible to place in a normal office and it's a manufacturing nightmare. As a product, it just fails completely. But as an inspiring statement, I think it succeeds. I don't think Colani's work should be judged as design. I think it 3D concept art. It's an optimistic exploration of how design can organically blend with the human form. Kolani was not afraid of making a statement, even if it had no scientific basis, no commercial value, and offered no functional benefit. Kolani simply wanted to entertain us. He'd go way past the point of safety, fully aware that most of his experiments would fail, and I really respect that. I'll never forget my first time encounter with Luigi Colani's work. It was 2009 at the peak of Apple's rectal linear hyperminimalism. The 100-year-old bow house philosophy dominated the design industry. Apple's product design, which was inspired by that movement, was considered the pinnacle, and it just never really resonated with me personally. But one day, my professor and now friend of the channel, Rafie Manasian, dropped a stack of Kolani's books on the table. The books were filled with hundreds of these wild organic forms. It completely blew my mind. Kani showed me that we didn't have to blindly follow these arbitrary rules of good design. There was a place for emotion and sensuality and risk in the design world. So for me, Colani's message was less about biomorphic design and more about having permission to explore completely absurd ideas. Although I definitely did explore some super weird biomorphic colani style stuff as a student, I felt relieved that conceptual work didn't have to be framed around whatever the corporate design machine decided was acceptable. A lot of design is about standardization, uniformity, and bureaucratic precision. It's how things scale efficiently. Kani was a refreshing counterbalance to that. I think Kolani also resonated with a lot of young designers because of the way he talked about his work. Other designers talked like this. I'd like to speak about my most brilliant design yet. If we consider the vessel as a locus for somatic cognition, it radiotics. It's a cup. I'm talking about a cup. When other designers need several minutes to explain why their design is so amazing, people start tuning out and it starts to feel like BS. But Colani kept it dead simple. Biomorphic design is the future. I'm the guy to prove it. And anyone who disagrees is stupid. His organic inspiration is obvious just by looking at it. You don't need an explanation of it. The confidence feels earned because it's easy to see and understand what he's trying to do. Even if you don't know any design theory, his work makes you feel something. So, his ideas are very accessible. Kolani didn't try to win anyone over because he didn't have to. He didn't need to appease design gatekeepers. He didn't speak their language. And he refused to accept their rules as truth. Designers often weaponize taste. We talk about good taste like it's a law of nature when it's mostly just a moving target that reflects whatever a culture or a powerful company has decided is good. Now that's still important and it has value. But if your map of taste begins and ends with DA Rom style minimalist restraint, then Colani will always be considered tasteless. But if you admit that taste is learned, Kolani's designs become a deliberate push against the rule book. This is why he inspired young designers. — I built aircraft out of shark corpses and they flew perfectly. —

— Does that sound like someone trying to impress the design intelligencia? I don't think so. His entire persona is a big middle finger to the design establishment. Colani really wasn't interested in appealing to the design elite, but he was very interested in appealing to the general public. He spent exorbitant amounts of money and time making television appearances and doing hundreds of interviews for newspapers and magazines. — Colani would often appear in Germany's bestselling magazine, Stern, where he would berate the entire design industry. His flare for drama, coupled with an Italian sounding name, resonated with an everyday audience. But Colani's biggest contribution to design, didn't come from a mainstream outlet. To understand his impact in the design world, you have to know about Car Styling magazine. It was the design bible for anyone serious about vehicle design. A subscription cost $100 in 1972, which is like $800 in today's money for four issues. Keep in mind, the people buying this magazine weren't rich. They were just students scraping together cash so they could get their hands on the most innovative global design inspiration. In 1978, Car Styling ran a special issue featuring Kolani. It was filled with pages and pages of imaginative biomorphic concepts, spectacular futuristic life-sized models, and a steady pulse of erotic references. Sometimes that erotic reference was subtle, other times not at all. Colani gave the male-dominated car design industry a heavy dose of fantastical ideas, and his work was featured in car styling magazine many more times over the next several decades. While it was understood that these concepts were completely impractical, it was impossible to ignore their impact. Through these magazines, Colani was exposing his ideas to the most ambitious and productive group of designers in the world. The younger generation was hungry for a new direction to exit the boring era of the mid to late 1970s. And Colani's inspirational designs were the antidote. This reveals Colani's most powerful distribution channel. It was the minds of students who had designed the future, and his work was their inspiration. I had the exact same experience with Colani's work 30 years later. For young designers, those Colani issues were thrilling and a little bit forbidden. And this is a good time to talk about something very obvious in Kolani's work, eroticism. Now, let's be real for a second here. If you've gotten this far into the video and haven't thought, "Hey, that design looks kind of like toy at least once. " You're lying to me. I mean, come on, look at this stuff. It's very obvious what his inspiration was. I mean, this is not only a toy. It's a toy coming out of another toy. And I haven't even shown the stuff that isn't safe for YouTube. To quote Kolani himself, it is absolutely the central theme in my design philosophy. That theme is erotic. The female body is one of the most extraordinary designs ever done in this universe. The more literal pieces feel objectifying. Rather than exploring feminine beauty through a lens of culture or symbolism, Kolani just replicated body parts and called it design. I think that his work is a lot more successful when he leans more heavily on sculptural abstraction. His persona and a lot of the imagery runs through a very distinctly male fantasy of this kind of playboy futurism. Fast cars, jets, guns, space pods, all staged like a rich penthouse set. And that framing is part of why some of the work carries sexist undertones, even when the forms are fairly abstract. On the bright side, Colani did celebrate desire and touch in a field obsessed with cold, lifeless minimalism. And I think Colani's erotic themes are most successful when he focuses on tactile sensuality, like how an object feels in the hand. It adds a refreshing aliveness to everyday objects. It's sort of felt. It's not spelled out. Kani did finally find the perfect canvas for those curves, but it wasn't in a car. Canon was one of the leading camera manufacturers in the world. But in the 1980s, after a long line of mediocre updates that sold poorly, the company was struggling. With increased competition from Nikon and plummeting sales of their SLR camera line, the company that once set the pace suddenly was falling behind. Like pretty much all corporations, Canon just wasn't going to take risks. They were a Japanese firm built on restraint, discipline, and precision engineering. But desperation had forced their hand. So, in a last stitch effort to reinvigorate their company, Canon hired the crazy German designer Luigi Kolani. Most companies hired Kolani as a sort of fun novelty to see what crazy ideas he might come up with, and then they quietly shelved the designs. But with Canon, this was no branding stunt. It was a survival move. The Canon design team almost never collaborated with outsiders. But they needed a change. While most camera designers focused on making designs that could easily be stamped or formed in metal, Colani focused on creating shapes that were comfortable to hold. The timing helped since by this point smaller internal components and a move to molded plastics meant Colani's hyperorganic surfaces were more feasible for mass production. In typical Colani fashion, he came up

with five concepts that felt like a psychotic biomorphic fever dream. And remember, these concepts are 40 years old. They still look crazy today. Canon was so impressed by Colani's concepts that they actually decided to work with him in making productionready models. Cameras were the perfect tool for Colani since so much of his philosophy was about a symbiosis that pulls humans into the form, creating the seamless integration of body and machine. In Colani's own words, it took 2 years of me telling them that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye. So, it had to have ergonomics on both sides. And a camera is also a very intimate tool. You wrap your fingers around it, press it right up to your face, and use it to capture personal moments. It's personal and precise at the same time. Canon supplied the precision, and Kolani created the intimacy of the object. In a field run by hyperanalytical minds, he gave this object a kind of artful sensuality that actually enhanced the precision. Colani worked with Japanese designer Kunihisa as well as the Canon design team to pull his wild concepts back down to earth. That unlikely split between engineered precision and artful eroticism became the Canon T90. When you pick up the Canon T90 and compare it to models from only a year or two earlier, it feels like the future. The silhouette, the way the grip nests into your palm, the way your index finger falls onto the shutter button. None of that was normal in the mid1 1980s. These things are obvious now, but it was unprecedented back then. Using this command wheel, photographers could change settings without even having to move their eye from the viewfinder. It was a camera that could be operated almost entirely by touch and feel. Every ridge, notch, and radius guided your hand to the next control. Once again, you have to remember that cameras only a few years before looked like this. Put a 1986 T90 next to a 2016 model, and the two cameras look like they could have been designed almost at the same time, even though they were designed 30 years apart. It's only in the last few years, with increasing popularity of mirrorless cameras, that camera body designs have started evolving again. All of the ideas discovered in the T90 paved the way for Canon's future camera designs. It can be argued that Colani's designs saved Canon's professional photography business. I think it's very telling that Colani's strongest practical legacy in the design industry involved collaboration. Showmanship and a singular vision can move culture, but it takes teamwork if you want your best ideas to stick. But the T90 wasn't Colani's only practical contribution to design. Colani railed endlessly on the stupidity of the automotive industry, especially when it came to aerodynamics. — They don't accept aerodynamics. Look at the cars running around. Those stupidities on wheels. Huh? You can't call them aerodynamics. — Now, to be fair, Colani does have a point here. Some production vehicles on the road are less aerodynamic than a cow. So, Colani did what he always does. He made a spectacle. He started with a stock Citroen 2CV. The 2CV was the people's car. It was cheap. It was durable and frugal with fuel rationing. He took this car and reshaped the body. He didn't change the chassis or the engine. He only changed the body shape. And it reportedly hit 138 m per gallon. That's pretty much better than any car on the market today. And he pulled it off half a century ago. As usual, this was not a productionready exterior design, but it was a demonstration that aerodynamic forms can unlock efficiency. He also did this with truck concepts, which to me are some of his most outrageous designs. Kani claims that these trucks are 40% more fuel efficient. But of course, they're more aerodynamic at the expense of like every other practical consideration. Just making this manufacturing is going to be a nightmare. But it's the same Colani pattern we've been seeing. Audacious concept, provocative data point, and a vision too far ahead or too weird for mass production. Most of Colani's work seems to be stuck in this middle ground. It's not quite concept art. It's not quite design. It's not quite sculpture. And it's hard to date his work. His career spanned at least 60 years, but it's hard to tell when each piece came from. Most futuristic design concepts age fast because it's linked to the tech of its moment. Victorian futuristic concept showed steam valves. 1980s sci-fi glows with LEDs. And today it's all ultra complicated parametric geometry. You can almost timestamp concept art and design just by the kinds of technology it shows. Colani dodges all of that. His proposals are all sculpture and almost no tech. Believable fictions built from pure aerodynamics, anatomy, and biomorphism. No robot faces, no exposed circuit boards, very little technology at all. He lets the form do the talking. A lot of this work is 40 to 60 years old, but it still reads pretty fresh because it isn't dating itself to the gadgets of its era. He rarely even added a date or time to his concepts. And I suspect that was intentional. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely exceptions to this

like this typewriter and the way that this woman is dressed immediately shows how old this concept is. But the core forms could be from 1978, 1998, or next spring. Ergonomics and fluid biomorphic forms are fairly timeless and there's a reason why the T90 body design lived on for several decades after it was produced. It's also interesting that the work itself never really evolved. Colani was extremely consistent in his vision. You'd think that after like 60 years as a professional in the industry, his philosophy would develop or change a little bit. At the same time, I do respect anyone who commits to a conceptual direction for an entire lifetime. That takes real dedication and discipline. Luigi Colani died in 2019 at the age of 91. But his fingerprints are everywhere. It's in the friendliness of the iMac G3. It's in the curves of the Audi 100, one of the most aerodynamic production cars of its time. It's in the way that modern everyday objects melt into your hand. These are not directly credited to Kani, but the echoes of his vision are unmistakable. I don't think he's the best designer, but he's one of the few designers that I actually like, which is strange given how unlikable and arrogant he can be. I think it's because I felt very alone in my approach as a young designer. I was always worried that my ideas were too fringe or too offbeat. My professors didn't really get it. And even in my work as a junior designer, I was encouraged to only present ideas that would win more client work, which makes sense. In that world, crazy revolutionary ideas die quietly. So, I think Colani's biggest contribution was that he gave us permission. He showed designers trapped in conformist corporate settings that it was okay to take a risk once in a while. What bothers me in modern society is our apathy. It's just so easy to unthinkingly accept things as they are. Mediocrity is the default. A lot of people are just trying to make a quick buck without actually caring about what they put into the world. But Kani actually cared. He cared enough to look ridiculous. He cared enough to fail very publicly. and break design conventions. That takes a lot of courage, and courage is foundational to any great creative pursuit. Kani was a design rebel who made it possible for others to lead themselves. He was wrong a lot of the time, but at least he was trying to push things forward. If you dismiss Luigi Kani and write him off as a joke, you'll miss the door that he left open. But if you take his message seriously, you'll walk through and start building a better future that looks and feels alive. The greatest thing I learned from him is simple. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to care. look stupid. And don't be afraid to try. And that is why for all his flaws, Luigi Colani is my favorite designer. These videos take hundreds of hours to make. I read a thousand plus pages of articles and books. I talk to industry experts and I reflect on my 15 years of design experience. If you like these videos and you want to help build a place where design and culture is discussed with depth and honesty, then consider supporting me on Patreon. You can sign up for a few dollars a month and as a show of thanks, you get early access to my videos, plus a behind-the-scenes commentary video. I want to give a huge shout out to my patrons on Patreon. I sincerely appreciate your support. I couldn't do this without you. I also want to give a big shout out to my former professor and friend of the channel, Rafi Manasian, for introducing me to Luigi Kolani's work all those years ago. He also helped a lot with this script. I hope you learned something and have a great day.