Sydney Jay Mead (July 18, 1933 – December 30, 2019) was an American artist, illustrator, industrial designer, and neo-futurist concept artist whose renderings of future cities, vehicles and technologies shaped the visual language of modern futurism and late twentieth-century science fiction.
Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Mead graduated from the Art Center School in Los Angeles in 1959 and joined Ford Motor Company's Advanced Styling Studio, leaving after roughly two years for a commission from U.S. Steel to portray steel as a material of the future. The five volumes he illustrated for the company were circulated and collected widely across industrial and educational circles, resulting in a transformation in his practice from mere transportation design to broad-scale applied futurism across a variety of disciplines.
In 1970, Mead founded Syd Mead, Inc., which remained the vehicle for the rest of his career. His work ranged across consumer products, technology, architecture, aeronautics, astronautics, sea craft, automotive, technology, immersive entertainment, and interactive/video games. Mead principally painted in gouache throughout his career, and maintained an independent art practice.
Mead worked on his first feature film in 1979, at the age of 45, when he designed the antagonist of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Commissions followed on Blade Runner and Tron in 1982, followed by more than a dozen additional films including 2010, Aliens, Short Circuit, Elysium, and Blade Runner 2049.
His designs have been cited as formative by filmmakers, industrial designers and architects, and his work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. He received the National Design Award in 2006, and the Art Directors Guild awarded him the William Cameron Menzies Award posthumously in 2020.
Mead coined the job title "visual futurist" for his screen credit on Blade Runner, and used it thereafter. He has been described as "the artist who illustrates the future" and "one of the most influential concept artists and industrial designers of our time."
Early life and education Mead was born on July 18, 1933, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father, Kenneth, was a Baptist minister who was also a painter and art instructor, having pursued a master's degree in art history from Sioux Falls College. Mead's own early drawings were the subject of his father's thesis on creativity in children. Films were not permitted in the household until Mead was thirteen, but Mead's father read him family friendly editions of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories before Mead could read.
The family moved frequently between ministerial postings in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Colorado. Mead sold his first artwork in the fifth grade, selling drawings to schoolmates for a quarter each. While in high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he was introduced to the science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein at Heinlein's home by a local physician for whom he had done illustration work.
Mead graduated from high school in Colorado Springs in 1951. He took a night-shift job at the Alexander Film Company, which produced advertising trailers for cinemas, and was promoted to cel inker after the studio's art director noticed his work. He simultaneously enrolled in day classes at Colorado College. To preempt selection via the draft, Mead volunteered for the U.S. Army, serving his enlistment in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1953 to 1956. He spent part of his tour on Okinawa, where he was a company training sergeant. While stationed there, he continued to draw vehicles and sent examples to John Reinhart, then-chief designer for the Continental program at the Ford Motor Company, who advised him to enroll at a design school in Los Angeles once his service ended.
Acting on that advice, Mead entered the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena) in 1956, choosing it over Chouinard and the Los Angeles School of Art, and majored in industrial design with a concentration in automotive design. His tuition was met through the G.I. Bill, a Ford scholarship and part-time work. His training at Art Center included figure drawing from live models, fine art history, fashion drawing, graphics, and instruction in gouache, which became his preferred medium. Mead graduated in June 1959 with a Bachelor of Professional Arts, and was hired by Ford Motor Company's Advanced Styling Studio a semester before graduating.
Career
Ford Motor Company Mead was recruited to Ford's Advanced Styling Studio in Detroit by Elwood Engel. He designed a launch exhibit for the Mercury Comet installed in the Ford Rotunda, and produced the full-size clay model design for the Gyron, a show vehicle built around a gyroscopic tandem-wheel system. Among his non-concept contributions were the tail lights of the 1963 Ford Falcon.
Mead left Ford after approximately twenty-six months. He attributed the departure to the "thinness of purpose" of production styling, stating that the process would be unchanged if the company switched from cars to washing machines.
Industrial illustration Late in Mead's term at Ford, John Reinhart – who had since departed his role at Ford to lead automotive marketing for United States Steel – commissioned Mead to create a promotional catalog portraying steel as a "material of the future". Mead painted the illustrations and laid out the entire volume in a month for a fee of $10,000. The catalog, Concepts (1961), proved to be a sensation well beyond its intended use as sales literature, and was converted into general promotional and marketing materials for the company.
Four further U.S. Steel titles followed: Projections (1962), Perspective (1964), Innovations (1968), concluding in 1969 with Interface: Portfolio of Possibilities, which was issued as a poster portfolio rather than a bound book. U.S. Steel distributed the volumes widely, supplying them to art and design schools across the United States, and advertised free copies in youth magazines. Mead later said the books "went horizontal through the design community," becoming cult objects among students across various disciplines.
The U.S. Steel commission was what drove Mead's departure from Ford in June 1961. Other commissions of the period included a promotional book and corporate logo redesign for Allis-Chalmers, a campaign for the Celcon division of Celanese, work with Raymond Loewy's Paris and New York studios, the Ford Ranger II custom vehicle for Ford's light truck division, and a consolidated logo system for Ford's Ford, Lincoln and Mercury divisions. Continuing his freelance relationship with Ford, Mead further designed the company's pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Among his speculative vehicle designs during these years were the Sentinel 280, a canopied long-wheelbase sports car, and the stretched Sentinel 400.
Syd Mead, Inc. Mead founded Syd Mead, Inc. in Detroit in 1970. He began with no clients, relying on the contacts and portfolio accumulated during the Ford and U.S. Steel years, and was contacted shortly afterward by Knut Yran, the Norwegian design director of Philips Electronics, whose account funded the new company. During this period, Mead turned down staff positions at General Motors and Chrysler. The firm relocated to California in 1975 and to Pasadena in 1998, and remained the vehicle for the whole of his subsequent career, including his film commissions. Its practice was unusually broad even by the standards of industrial design consultancies, and the film work for which Mead became publicly known represented a minority of its output.
Industrial and product design Mead's first major account was with Philips Electronics' Corporate Industrial Design Centre in Eindhoven, a relationship that lasted twelve years. Through the 1970s, Mead spent roughly a third of his time in Europe. For the company's Netherlands Advanced Technology laboratory, he produced forward designs across its entire range – computers, televisions, refrigerators, cassette recorders, the first laser-disc recorder and the interior of the corporate jet – typically projecting five to six years ahead of current technology so that management and advertising could be prepared for products before launch. He worked concurrently with Raymond Loewy Associates in Paris and New York across a range of projects, including interior concepts for Concorde and the first Airbus interior.
From 1983 onward, Mead built a second base of clients in Japan, among them Sony, Minolta, Dentsu, Dyflex, Tiger Corporation, Seibu, Mitsukoshi, Bandai, NHK and Honda. The work ranged from consumer products for The Tiger Corporation, to advertising illustration for Minolta and RAYS Wheels. Mead served for several years as chief judge of Sony's international design competition.
Transportation, aviation and marine Mead's transportation work extended well beyond automobiles. In 1973, Norwegian Caribbean Lines commissioned him to design a cruise ship, a project he later named as his favorite non-automotive work. He designed the interior of a Boeing 747 for the royal house of Saudi Arabia and a 747SP for the royal house of Oman, and a Boeing 727 for the Sultan of Brunei. Marine commissions included a succession of surface-effect-ship yacht designs for Halter Marine, a superyacht for Michael Peters Yachts in 1993, and an air-cushion vehicle for the royal house of Malaysia through Textron Marine. He also produced an interior for the Lancia Delta with Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign in the late 1970s.
Architecture and the built environment Architectural rendering for other firms was the practice's steadiest commercial work through the 1970s and 1980s. Clients included Intercontinental Hotels, 3D International, Harwood K. Smith and Partners, Donghia, Gresham & Smith, RTKL and Trammell Crow.
Distinct from this rendering work, Mead originated architectural and urban proposals of his own. These included a city-center scheme for Houston, TX, a spaceport complex for Kobe developed in 1987, and civic, commercial and exposition centers for clients in South Korea and Singapore. In 2008, he designed the Bar Basque and Food Parc, a Manhattan restaurant and bar, with Philip Koether Architects. The spaces operated in the Eventi Hotel from 2010 before shuttering in 2012.
Themed entertainment From the late 1980s onward, the firm took on a substantial body of themed-entertainment work, much of it in Japan and Korea. Mead designed laser-tag arena attractions for Dyflex in Tokyo, among them a six-story venue in Shibuya. He produced a master plan for a waterfront "space park" in Kitakyushu for Toei Animation and Nippon Steel, a nine-screen Euro Disney attraction, and later interior concepts at Disneyland for Walt Disney Imagineering. Other commissions included a casino attraction for the Las Vegas Hilton and theatre, theme-castle and exposition projects for Landmark Entertainment.
Editorial work, lecturing and licensing Mead illustrated for Automobile Quarterly, Playboy, National Geographic and Car Styling from the late 1960s onward, the magazine commissions often pairing his illustrations with speculative essays on future life and technology.
In 1983, Chrysler Corporation invited Mead to address its design staff. The accompanying slide presentation was subsequently expanded and delivered to clients including Disney, Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Pratt Institute and the Society of Illustrators, and lecturing became a continuing part of the practice. In March 2010, he completed a four-city lecture tour of Australia. In 1993, a digital gallery of 50 works, with interface screens designed by Mead, became one of the first CD-ROMs released in Japan. In 2004, he worked with the Gnomon School of Visual Effects on a four-volume instructional DVD series, Techniques of Syd Mead.