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A designer's ability is measured by the kind of influence he has on their era and on the future generations. Verner Panthon, one of the influential designers was known for his revolutionary designs. The striking features of his work are the sculptural elegance and the color which made his work stood out from that of his contemporaries.

Verner Panton was born on the isle of Fynen in Denmark. His father owned an inn. Because he wanted to be a designer, he took courses at the Copenhagen Academy of Art. After that, he worked for two years in Arne Jacobsen's architecture firm, apparently being a somewhat poor worker who preferred to pass his time on the development of his own designs.

Panton has a nunber of classics to his name. The most famous of them is the instantly recognizable Panton stacking chair. This monocoque form is in production now by Vitra and uses more advanced plastics, such as injection-molded polypropylene, than the ones Panton first saw it produced in. There are many cheap, Chinese copies of his design out there, which, though damaging to the designer's reputation due to poor quality, are a definite sign of a nice design. There is not really much of a point in buying a copy, since you'd get a chair which cannot be sold for profit, and you would generally only save about 30 percent on the cost of the genuine article. Vitra has a limited edition, orange Panton chair this year, so there are no excuses!

Another of Panton's great designs is the Cone chair. These chairs were astonishing at the time of their release, the single pivoting point being a huge departure from the three or four legs people expected from a chair at the time. I remember my first encounter with this chair clearly as I could not get over the optical illusion it produces. It seems to just stand, perfectly balanced, top-heavy and paying no regard whatsoever to the laws of physics.

Those two items together with Mr. Panton's renowned interior design (heminredning) efforts were tremendously influential during the ten years after they first appeared. In the early 1970s, he designed one more unique form. That was the so-called System 1-2-3 chair which was done on behalf of Fritz Hansen. It may have the sound of a kind of football or basketball pool in your office, but is rather a superbly crafted, highly flexible chair, easy to manufacture and extremely comfortable.

Although these three chairs are classics of furniture design, the most common piece of Panton's work you are likely to see is a lamp. His table and pendant Flowerpot lamps are found everywhere. No wonder since they are very cheap to produce, convenient, available in many colors, have a great designer name behind them, and have a classic look that is sought after by many.

Panton was such a prolific designer that it would be possible to write for days about his work. In its time it pushed boundaries and confounded expectations. Indeed much of Panton's work has survived the psychedelic stigma of the sixties and takes its place among the timeless modern classics of furniture and interior design (heminredning).