Hartmut Esslinger

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WEGA Studio 3214 (1972)
Apple IIc (1986)
Yamaha TQ5 (1988)
NeXTcube (1989)

Hartmut Esslinger (born June 5, 1944 in Beuren near Altensteig ) is a German-American product designer .

Life

Esslinger studied electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart and from 1966 to 1969 industrial design at the Schwäbisch Gmünd University of Applied Sciences . While still a student, he founded Esslinger Design in Mutlangen in 1969 . In 1982 it was renamed frog design . For many years he was the managing director of frog design Europe GmbH in Herrenberg near Stuttgart, which has attracted attention since the 1970s with its product design and branding and in recent years with the design of multimedia applications (including Apple Macintosh , Lufthansa , Windows XP , SAP ).

Esslinger Design initially received the order to develop a new line of hi-fi and television sets for the German company Wega , which was later taken over by Sony . In 1971 Esslinger designed the Tribel shower head for the sanitary fittings manufacturer hansgrohe , which has been sold over 15 million times. In the same year Wega launched the color 3020 TV , which, like the compact system concept 51k from 1976, was included in the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Esslinger also started a collaboration with Kaltenbach & Voigt , which produce equipment and instruments for dentists and dental laboratories. In the following years he worked a. a. for Louis Vuitton , Texas Instruments , Sony, Fissler and Kaldewei . 1980 saw the first contact with Steve Jobs , whose company Apple was the most important customer for a long time. The Apple IIc home computer received Time Magazine's Design of the Year award. In addition to the successful Macintosh product line, numerous other prototypes and design studies were created. In the 1980s, Esslinger also worked for Villeroy & Boch , Kodak , Yamaha , Sun Microsystems , NeXT , Logitech , Rosenthal and Olympus . He designed various synthesizers for Yamaha.

In 1982 the company "Esslinger Design" was renamed "frogdesign" (later frog design ). In addition, a branch office was established in the USA. Today, frog design operates from studios in Palo Alto ( US - Headquarters ,) Austin , Milan , New York , San Francisco , San Jose , Seattle , Shanghai and Munich from. Esslinger became a founding member of the Karlsruhe University of Design in 1992 and worked in the 1990s a. a. for NEC , Samsung , Acer , Dual , Lufthansa , Siemens , Disney and SAP.

In the 1990s, Hartmut Esslinger and his wife Patricia Roller took American citizenship.

His company frog design has been responsible for the external appearance of Windows XP ( Microsoft ) since 2000 , and an Internet sales platform was developed for Dell . For Disney Inc. the company did product design; u. a. designed the appearance of the Disney cruise fleet.

Esslinger sold his last shares in the company in 2006 and left frog design; he remained connected to the company as an external consultant. He then took on a professorship for industrial design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2006 to 2011 . Since 2008 he has been a designer at Telefunken Licenses GmbH, among other things . Esslinger Industrial Design has been a DaTao Master at the DaTao Academie in Shanghai since 2012 .

Esslinger was the owner of the former American amateur football club San José Frogs , (2005-2008) which played in the USL Premier Development League .

Awards and prizes (selection)

further reading

  • Hartmut Esslinger and Frogdesign. by Hartmut Esslinger and Uta Brandes, 1992 Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, ISBN 3-88243-215-2
  • Frog: Form Follows Emotion (Cutting Edge S.) by Fay Sweet, 1999 Thames and Hudson Ltd., ISBN 0-500-01917-7
  • Frogdesign by Hartmut Esslinger and Volker Fischer, 2000 Edition Axel Menges , ISBN 3-930698-05-6
  • A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business by Hartmut Esslinger, 2009 Jossey-Bass, ISBN 0-470-45102-5
  • Ingeniously simple - the early design years of Apple by Hartmut Esslinger, ARNOLDSCHE Art Publishers, Stuttgart, 2014, ISBN 978-3-89790-408-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frog Design founder Hartmut Esslinger - "I play Hartmut" ; Wirtschaftswoche, November 15, 2007
  2. ↑ https://www.pz-news.de/geschaeftswelt_artikel,-Legendaerer-AppleComputer-nahm-im-Schwarzwald-seine-Gestalt-an-_arid,312916.html
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i manager-magazin.de of September 10, 2013, Frog's milestones from four decades , accessed on August 26, 2020.
  4. ↑ GREEN BOX: YAMAHA DX11, TX81Z, YS100, YS200, TQ5, DS55. Retrieved July 22, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Frog Design - "We're plumbers for companies" ; manager magazin, March 31, 2010
  6. ↑ a b c Vita Prof. Hartmut Esslinger , at 2019.mcbw.de ( Munich Creative Business Week ) accessed on August 27, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Esslinger, Hartmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American product designer
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Beuren near Altensteig