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Bill Plumb is a noted designer with more than 40 years experience as head of his own firm. He is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America (FIDSA) and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR), having been awarded a Prix de Rome in 1986 in Advanced Design.
Following graduation from Cornell and a three-year naval career as a gunnery officer on a destroyer in the Pacific Fleet, Plumb began his design career in Italy as an apprentice in the studio of Gio Ponti, the famed Milanese architect/designer. While living in Milan he also worked as a consultant to the Product Development Office of La Rinascente department stores under the late Augusto Morello. Morello was responsible for modern marketing methods to Italy and, until his recent death, was President of ICSID (the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. Plumb also collaborated on a number of projects with the architect, Gianfranco Frattini.
After two years in Milan, he returned to the U.S. and joined the office of Eliot Noyes, founder and then-consultant director of the seminal IBM Corporate Design Program where he was involved in a wide variety of design and marketing activities from brand identity issues to the design and development of a number of highly successful IBM office products like the IBM Model D Electric Typewriter illustrated above. This machine was the last of the electric type-bar typewriters made by IBM. This was the time in history when the mechanical office machine was being replaced by computers and Plumb was responsible for the industrial design of such products as the first IBM word processor.
In 1963 Plumb left Noyes and opened his own design firm in New York with IBM as his first client. The work of his firm has subsequently centered on a broad range of strategic issues, among them:
- New product design and development.
- Comprehensive corporate identity and branding.
- Visual marketing - the design of salesware and environments created to sell products and ideas more profitably.
- The visual interpretation and expression of technology as a marketing tool.
Much of the work of Plumb’s office has centered on office automation for the Savin/Ricoh group, Dictaphone, Apple and others. The design of the controls for most office copiers is today based on a prize winning design for the Savin/Ricoh group in the 1980s and all Ricoh office machines follow color and detail standards developed more than 10 years ago by the Plumb office. The quality of Plumb design has always been a careful balance of ergonomic excellence, functional simplicity and understated esthetics that stays in fashion reducing the necessity for the frequent need for tooling change that drives costs up and wastes corporate resources.
Awards
Projects for which the Plumb firm has been responsible have appeared in many publications such as Abitare, Business Week and ID and have been included in exhibitions at leading museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. A number of Plumb-designed products have won design awards at the Hanover Fair in Germany. In 1983 Plumb was elected a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America. In 1986 the American Academy in Rome awarded Plumb a prestigious Prix de Rome. He has served several terms as a Vice-President of the Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome.
Writing and Teaching
Plumb has written extensively on design and marketing issues for many publications both professional and general in nature. He was a long-time member of the Editorial Advisory Board of ID magazine. Articles about him and his firm have appeared in ID, Metropolis, Interiors, Fortune, Domus 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. Plumb has actively participated in many events conducted by professional organizations such as the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Design Management Institute and the Industrial Designers Society of America.
Packaging CDs
In the early 1990s, Plumb co-invented and managed the development of an innovative new CD package called the Q-Pack® for one of the world’s largest print packagers for recorded media, Queens Group, Inc.. As a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions, the patents for this package are currently licensed to International Paper. As a result of his experience in this area, he was, in 2000, offered the presidency of a new company, Avecmedia, Inc., where he was instrumental in developing another new line of proprietary CD packaging products. Under his direction the company has commercialized and successfully licensed several iterations of the product, the AvecPAKtm. While retaining the position of President of Avecmedia, Plumb’s consultancy has been revived under the name of plumb(dsgn/mktng)inc. and is now located in Piermont, NY.
Intellectual Property Expert Witness
Among his professional activities, he has been qualified and has testified as an Expert Witness in a number of cases for the New York Intellectual Property law firms Darby and Darby and O’Sullivan Graev & Karabell, LLP and the Norwalk, Connecticut IP law firm, Grimes and Battersby, LLC.
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