What constitutes design? It’s an age-old question, which, in response, throws up a raft of terms, including product, process and, of course, designer.

On one fundamental level, design is anything that a designer produces. It’s no surprise then that active text searches on Architonic often include designer names – both the great and the good, and the lesser-known. Both the living and the dead.

Here are the top-20 designers, as searched for on architonic.com between 1 January and 30 November 2014.* It’s a mixed bag when it comes to nationalities and the division between living designers and those who’ve shuffled off this mortal coil is fairly even.

When it comes to the top-100 designers, however, Europe is positioned firmly centre-stage, with Italy being particularly well represented – which says a lot about the ongoing legacy the country’s post-war design boom created. The grandees of its design scene are names slow to leave the design consciousness at large.

Beyond Europe, only two countries, interestingly, make the grade – USA and Japan.

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* Our methodology
This presentation is based on traffic information collected on architonic.com. All statistics and rankings shown in this article are based on the number of relevant search queries entered in the text search field on architonic.com (‘by text search’).