Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

One man designed all of it. The fridge, the cigarette pack, the bus, the logo, the locomotive, the car. His name was Raymond Loewy, a French engineer who stepped off the boat in New York in 1919, and by mid-century you could live most of your day inside his imagination. In 1949 he became the first designer ever to make the cover of Time. Later he’d do the paint job on Air Force One for Kennedy and the interiors of Skylab for NASA. He is probably the most influential designer you’ve never heard of.

And he ran his whole career on one rule. He called it MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Loewy believed every customer walks around with two forces pulling in opposite directions. One is attraction to the new. The other is fear of it. His job, as he saw it, was to design as far forward as possible, to push right up to the edge of what people can accept, and stop there. The most advanced thing they’ll still say yes to.