Syd Mead designed the world I want to live in – a beautiful retro-futuristic mash up of Mid 20th Century Modern and Jetsons-style sci-fi. He is one of those talents that come only once or twice in a generation. The best of his images blend a 60′s creative optimism, with his industrial designer’s understanding of nuts and bolts possibility, and even though some of them are getting on for 50 years old, they still look incredibly up to date. They all combine stunning artistic technique with a vivid but plausible imagination. You only need to look at how cities like Shanghai & Abu Dhabi are developing now to see how far ahead of the curve he was. It’s like the world’s visionary architects and developers are only now beginning to catch him up.

Beginning as an industrial designer for Ford, he moved on to United States Steel among others before launching his own studio in 1970. His talent was noticed by Hollywood and he became celebrated world-wide as the lead designer and concept artist on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He also contributed to films such as Tron, Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Mission Impossible 3, and is currently working on Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium. The trailer for a 2006 film about Mead can be seen here and his own website is here.