There’s a post that’s been circulating lately, maybe you’ve seen it. It lines up the classic Bic Cristal pen from the 1950s to one from today. All of them... basically "unchanged". The caption beams: “Times change, but some designs never do.” or the classic "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
And at first glance, it feels like a mic drop.
You scroll past, maybe even nod to yourself. There’s something oddly satisfying about it. As if we’ve unlocked some rare level of design perfection so pure, it didn’t need fixing.
But that’s not the story of the Bic. Not even close.
Let’s rewind a bit.
Before Bic, writing was tedious. Feather quills and bottled ink defined writing for centuries... messy, smudgy, and unreliable. Fountain pens improved things but were fragile, expensive, and prone to leaking. By 1900, the global literacy rate hovered around 20%. Not because people didn’t want to read, but because the tools to write and communicate were inefficient and inaccessible.
There were early attempts at alternatives. In 1888, John Loud designed a pen with a rolling ball that worked great... on leather. On paper? It tore through the fibers. Others tried to refine the mechanism, but it was a precision puzzle: if the ball fit too tight, the ink clogged; too loose, and it leaked like a faucet. The ball had to be engineered to near perfection.
The real breakthrough wasn’t in the ball. It was in the ink.
László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, got frustrated watching ink smudge across the page as he wrote. He wanted a pen that dried faster and didn’t drag. So he tinkered with a ball mechanism, and realized the problem wasn’t just mechanical. It was chemical. He developed a thicker, oil-based ink that sat on top of the page instead of soaking into it (the ink would roll out rather than flow out) and patented the design. Suddenly, writing became smoother, cleaner, and more consistent.
But it still wasn’t accessible. Bíró’s pen worked, but it wasn’t cheap.
That’s when Marcel Bich stepped in. A French businessman with an eye for scale, he bought the patent and applied techniques from Swiss watchmaking to mass-produce ultra-precise metal balls at a fraction of the cost. In 1950, he released the Bic Cristal. It worked flawlessly. It cost next to nothing. It was disposable by design, and it spread faster than any writing tool in history.
And here’s the quiet consequence of all that engineering: Today, world literacy stands near 90%. It’s one of the greatest design stories ever told. Except… it’s rarely told at all.
Simplicity isn’t the absence of complexity. It’s the result of mastering it.
Most people just see the pen and think: “It’s always looked like this.” Which is exactly the point. Because while the outer form has barely changed since 1950, everything underneath it has.
The ink formula has been refined for smoother flow. The cap was redesigned to be vented, preventing choking hazards. The plastic became lighter, safer, cheaper. The metal tip (once a marvel of affordability) is now tungsten carbide, shaped with diamond tools. Even the manufacturing process evolved to fully automated lines producing over 4 million pens a day.
This wasn’t “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It was: keep fixing it so it doesn’t look broken. And that’s the twist no one sees.
But maybe the most important oversight isn’t just aesthetic. Its missing two kinds of brilliance:
- The upstream innovation: the invisible complexity that led to a design so good, it felt inevitable.
- The downstream evolution: the quiet upgrades that happened after the design was locked, so that it could keep working without ever looking different.
In other words, this isn’t a story about something that never changed. It’s a story about something that kept changing so we wouldn’t have to notice.
Let’s Design The Next…
At twopoint0, we don’t just help organizations build what’s next, we help them recognize what’s worth protecting. Because not everything needs to look new to keep working. And not every innovation needs to be visible to be valuable.
Whether we’re redesigning systems, services, or experiences, we know that the most effective progress often hides in the details... the ink formula, not just the outer shell.
That’s the kind of design fluency we bring: How to preserve what people trust, while quietly reinventing how it works.
So the next time someone says, “It’s always been this way,” ask: What’s evolved so it could feel that way? #LetsDesignTheNext #InvisibleInnovation #DesignedToLast
