Jay Doblin was a US industrial designer and educator. He was born in Brooklyn, NY and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1942. He worked for Raymond Loewy from 1942 to 1955 directing the Frigidaire account and designing vending machines for Coca-Cola, razors for Schick and fountain pens for Eversharp. He was briefly a partner with Lippincott & Margulies and directed the night school at Pratt Institute from 1947 to 1952. In 1955 he became director of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Institute of Design in Chicago after the resignation of Serge Chermayeff, and in 1957 established the first graduate program for industrial design there with a strong emphasis on engineering.
His book, Perspective, A New System for Designers was published in 1955 and another, One Hundred Great Product Designs, based on selections made by faculty at IIT, was published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company in 1970.
Doblin was president of The American Society of Industrial Designers (ASID) in 1956 and of the Industrial Design Educators Association (IDEA) in 1962.
In 1964, Doblin received a Kaufmann research grant for work in progress. In 1969 he joined Unimark, a design consulting firm specializing in corporate identity programs, and served as a senior VP. With Unimark, he worked with the J.C. Penney Company to develop a comprehensive corporate identity program that in 1974 won an IDSA Special Award for the Advancement of Design.
In 1972 he left Unimark and founded Jay Doblin & Associates. In 1985, Unimark was reorganized as a new partnership, Doblin Keely Malin Stamos, headed by Larry Keeley. After 1994 it was known as the Doblin Group, and in 1997 became part of Perot Systems.
Read Jay Doblin's A Short Grandiose Theory of Design, one of the last pieces he wrote before he died.
