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William Lansing Plumb, FIDSA, FAAR
William Lansing Plumb is an award-winning industrial designer, and design consultant in product design, product development, graphic design and industrial design. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has won international acclaim. He has designed consumer goods, durable goods, exhibit spaces, CD and DVD packaging, and is the holder of many patents. To learn more about what a design consultation can do for your product line, please contact Bill Plumb at wlplumb@aol.com.
- William Plumb, FIDSA,
FAAR
- plumb(dsgn/mktng)inc.
- Awards
- Writing and Teaching
- Packaging CDs
- Intellectual Property Expert
Witness
Design consultant Bill Plumb is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America (FIDSA) and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR), which awarded him a "Prix de Rome" in 1986 in Advanced Design. In 2003 he celebrates his 40th anniversary as the head of his own product design and marketing firm. Highlights of his career as a graphic design, product design and marketing consultant include an apprenticeship with designer Gio Ponti, a stint in product design and marketing with Eliot Noyes,and extensive recent experience with packaging design as a design consultant and principal of plumb(dsgn/mktng)inc.
Following graduation from Cornell University and a three-year career as an naval officer, Bill Plumb began his career in product design as an apprentice at the industrial design firm of Gio Ponti, the famed Milanese architect/designer. While living in Milan he also worked as a consultant to the Ufficio Sviluppo (development office) of La Rinascente department stores.
Back in the U. S. he joined the office of Eliot Noyes, founder and consultant director of the seminal IBM Corporate Design Program where he was involved in a wide variety of product design and marketing activities including brand identity, developing marketing collateral, and the product design and development of a number of successful IBM products.
William Lansing Plumb left Noyes and opened his own design firm in New York in 1963 with IBM as his first client (with the full support of his former employer.) The work of his firm has subsequently centered on a broad range of issues, among them:
- New product design and development.
- Comprehensive corporate identity/branding.
- Visual marketing; the coordinated design of promotional materials
and environments to sell products and ideas. These activities have included CD packaging design, the design of marketing collateral, and trade show kiosk design.
- The visual interpretation and expression of technology as a
marketing tool.
Plumb and his associates have played major roles in developing product design and marketing strategies for companies like Apple Computer, AT&T, Bussman (Buss-brand fuses), Corning, Dictaphone, Du Pont (Corian-brand solid surface material), Hitachi, IBM, International Paper, Ricoh, Savin, and United Technologies, among others.
Projects for which Bill Plumb has been responsible have appeared in the design reviews of Business Week and ID and have been included in exhibitions at leading museums.
In 1983 he was elected a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America (http://www.idsa.org/).
In 1986 the American Academy in Rome awarded Plumb the prestigious "Prix de Rome". He has served several terms as a Vice-President of the Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome (http://www.aarome.org/).
Plumb has written extensively on design and marketing issues for many publications. Articles about him and his firm have appeared in ID, Metropolis, Interiors, Fortune, Domus, New York Magazine and numerous others.
He has lectured at Cornell, Pratt, Ohio State, Rochester Institute of Technology, The University of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Center College in Pasedena and the American Academy in Rome. He has taught studio design courses at the University of the Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In the early 1990s, Plumb, while working in the packaging design industry, co-invented and managed the product development of an innovative new CD package called the Q-Pack™. As a result of his experience with CD and DVD packaging, he was, in 2000, offered the presidency of a new company, Avecmedia, Inc., where he has been developing a new line of products for CD packaging (http://www.avecmedia.com/). At AvecMedia, he has commercialized several iterations of the AvecPAK™, a proprietary optical disc packaging product. As the AvecMedia product line has come into the marketplace, Plumb has redirected his energies toward his product design and marketing firm, now called plumb(dsgn/mktng)inc.
Intellectual Property Expert Witness
Among his professional activities, Plumb has been qualified and has testified as an Expert Witness in a number of Intellectual Property cases for the New York law firms of Darby and Darby and O'Sullivan Graev & Karabell, LLP. This testimony has drawn on his knowledge as a marketing expert and product development and design consultant, particularly in the areas of CD and DVD packaging design.
Plumb lives just north of New York City in Piermont, NY with his wife, a psychotherapist. A son, Christian, is an Editor-in-Charge for Reuters in New York City and a daughter, Abigail, works in product development and management at Register.com, also in New York.
Rev. 06/23/06