Hartmut Esslinger

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

Life and work

Hartmut Esslinger is the founder and was for many years managing director of Frog Design Europe GmbH in Herrenberg near Stuttgart, which has the design of multimedia applications found since the 1970s, with its product design and branding, and in recent years increasingly attention ( including Apple Macintosh, Lufthansa, Windows XP, SAP). Today frog design operates from studios in Palo Alto ( U.S. headquarters ), Austin, Milan, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Shanghai and Munich.

Hartmut Esslinger 1966-1970 studied at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, Schwäbisch Gmünd, while still studying in 1969 he founded the company Esslinger Design in Mutlangen. For the company he was commissioned to develop a new line of hi-fi and TV sets for the German company Wega, which was later taken over by Sony. 1971 began Esslinger for hans grohe, which invented the shower head Tribel ( which sold over 15 million copies ) to work. In the same year the Vega was introduced in 3000 color television on the market. In addition, Esslinger began a collaboration with " Kaltenbach and Voigt " ( KaVo Dental GmbH ), which produce equipment and instruments for dentists and dental laboratories. In the following years he did with his company further design work, including for Louis Vuitton, Texas Instruments, Sony, Fissler, and Kaldewei. In 1980 there was the first contact with Steve Jobs ( Apple Computer ), whose company a long time was the most important customer. He was, inter alia, among others, the design -of -the- Year Award from the Time Magazine for the Apple IIc, later Macintosh series excellent. In the 1980s, Esslinger worked for Villeroy & Boch, Kodak, Yamaha, Sun Microsystems, NeXT, Logitech, Rosenthal and Olympus.

In 1982, the company " Esslinger Design" has been renamed " frogdesign ". In addition, a field office in the United States was founded. Esslinger 1992 founding member of the College of Design, Karlsruhe and worked in the 90s, among other things, for NEC, Samsung, Acer, Dual, Lufthansa, Siemens, Disney, and SAP.

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

Since 2000, his firm frog design is responsible for the appearance of Windows XP ( Microsoft), for a Dell Internet sales platform has been developed. For Disney Inc. the company product design operation; inter alia, designed to the appearance of the Disney cruise fleet.

Esslinger 2006 sold its last shares in the company and retired in frog from design; He remained associated with the company as an external consultant. He then took over from 2006 to 2011 Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Since 2008, he has, among other designer of Telefunken Licenses GmbH.

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

Hartmut Esslinger

Life and work

Awards and Prizes (selection )

Further Reading