Industrial and package designer born in Munich, Germany, Landor was a founder/partner of the Industrial Design Partnership in London from 1935 to 1939. Traveling in the US in 1939, he became associate professor of industrial design and interior architecture at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1940. In 1941 he founded Walter Landor and Associates in San Francisco, which would later establish regional headquarters in New York, London and Tokyo, specializing in corporate identity, branding and packaging. In 1961, he was a recipient of an Alcoa annual industrial design award. In 1964 he moved to a floating office, the Klamath ferryboat docked at San Francisco Pier 5, which author Tom Wolfe dubbed "the flagship of packaging design." Well-known trademarks included the Bank of America, 7-up, British Airways, Alitalia, JAL, Levi’s, the trademark for the National Cotton Council (1973), Black & Decker’s new trademark (1985) and the new global corporate identity for Federal Express (1994).