Timo Sarpaneva is the focus of an exhibition at the Design Museum in Helsinki, Finland. He has had enormous influence on two of our Smart Brands partners Iittala and Rosenthal.
Also in the exhibition are photographs that tell some of his story — among them, images of the fantastical, crowd-attracting shop windows (adorned with glass harps and butterflies hanging from invisible wires) that he created for Iittala, the company that hired him in 1950. It was there that he made his name as a glass designer, of both art pieces and usable ones. In the latter category are the colored drinking glasses and beakers of the (pre-Internet) i series, for which he created a special logo: a boxy, lower case i that sits at the center of a small blood-red circle. Simple, bold, easy to identify and jolly, it soon became the company logo and remains so to this day.