Design Logic was founded in March 1985 in Chicago by David Gresham and Martin Thaler. Gresham was a student of Katherine and Michael McCoy at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (CAA) at the time he began the company. He received his master’s degree in design in 1986. Thaler is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art. The two met while working at the ITT Corporate Design Center. A third designer, James Ludwig, joined the company in 1987. He holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

The company espoused a philosophy called product semantics, which was the title of Gresham’s thesis at CAA. It meant “to embed necessary information in the design of the product: how to use it, how to regard it, where to put it, how it fit into your life.”

Martin Thaler’s view of the company’s goal was: “We want to make products with exuberance, humor. Then maybe people will use them more and buy more”.

Design Logic’s major clients were mainly outside the Chicago area, and in Europe, and included Bang & Olufsen, Dictaphone and View-Master. They designed a family of workstation terminals for RC Computer in Denmark. Design Logic won several awards, including Industrial Design (ID) Annual Design Review’s best of category award (1988) for three digital answering machine concepts, and the ID Magazine Designer’s Choice award in 1986 for their Compact Disc Video Camera and the View-Master.

Though Gresham left the company in 1989, Thaler and Ludwig continued to complete projects and to design under the company name until 1993.

Thaler is currently visiting associate professor at the ITT Institute of Design and Gresham is the vice president of Wet Design. Ludwig is vice president of global design for Steelcase, Inc.