Industrial Designer Raymond Loewy once said: "I dream all the time. It's the only way to keep awake." Last week he got a dream-job: all the designing (from soap wrappers to retail stores) for one of the world's great industrial empires, Britain's 500-company, globe-girdling Unilever.
What made the job a designer's dream was the fact that few of Unilever's products had shucked their plain-paper wrappings of World War II. Almost always, a designer has to compromise his ideas with the maker's notions of indispensable, brand-identifying trimmings. For Unilever, French-born Raymond Loewy could shoot...