Logitech: A Culture of Design
A Backgrounder on Logitech s Award-Winning Industrial Design Process
For 25 years, Logitech has been making personal peripherals that enhance the digital experience and also reflect a sophisticated sense of style that accents desktops, living rooms, offices and mobile devices everywhere. Logitech s designs, and its industrial design process, have received accolades throughout the world. In 2005, Logitech products were honored with Japan s Good Design awards, red dot awards, iF Industrie
Forum Design awards, CES Innovations Design and Engineering awards, and an ID
Magazine Design Distinction award, among others.
While Logitech s reputation for design is far reaching, the company s industrial design process begins with a very narrow focus on the impact that each product has on the average consumer s digital experience. Logitech products reside at the intersection between human sensation and the digital world. It is at this place where consumer experience is defined by equal parts of a product s performance and beauty. Logitech scrutinizes every surface, every button, every software screen, and every other meticulous detail with the intent of providing its customers with premium peripherals of unmatched beauty, supreme comfort, and superior performance.
Why is Logitech different? For starters, design is part of the company s lifeblood.
A Culture of Design
Logitech design is as much cultural as it is process. Employees lovingly nurture a company-wide, deep-seated passion for making products that are appealing and exceed expectations. There is a culture, a spirit and a continuity of design that permeates the organization, and is ultimately reflected in the products, said Jerry
Escobar, Logitech s director of worldwide brand identity. "It s a tribal knowledge that has been passed down through the evolution of the company. From the start, the company founders placed an explicit emphasis on design. And the company s current leaders joined Logitech with a similar commitment to design.
This emphasis on design is infused throughout every part of the organization. Wander through the halls of the company s offices and you see examples of Logitech s design work hanging with pride on walls, sitting on shelves in offices and carefully placed in conference rooms. Products new and old, packaging, pre-production models and components are everywhere. Take the cubicle occupied by Christopher Pate, a Logitech product manager for gaming products. His workspace in Logitech s Fremont, Calif. office is a de facto archive of Logitech s design history. He has a sample of the company s first retail mouse, the C-7, from 1987, hanging on his cubicle wall. Webcams, joysticks, game controllers many from years gone by take residence on his cubicle counters. And gaming wheels his current product line are found in every odd corner, and stacked in packaging, many rising above his cubicle wall. It s part pride, Pate says about the many designs has on display, and part practical aid. I always want to be able to look around and see reminders of what we did well and also get ideas for how we can improve, he said.
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Working with the best
The company s rich history of award-winning design also stems from working with some of the world s most visionary design agencies from leading Silicon Valley firms such as
Frog Design and IDEO, to innovative specialist houses such as Ireland s Design
Partners. Internal product teams and external designers nurture an extremely close relationship. A product concept is defined and designs take shape through hours of discussions and deliberation between product teams and design consultants.
