Noyes worked on corporate imagery for IBM, Mobil Oil, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse.

However, after meeting guest lecturer Le Corbusier in the school library, his architectural outlook changed entirely.

[3] After graduating with his masters in architecture in 1938, Noyes joined Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer's firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From 1939 to 1946, Noyes was employed by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City as director of industrial design.

He took leave from MoMA during World War II to set up a program to explore the potential uses for gliders by the Army Air Force.

[1] Prior to his work on the Selectric, Noyes was commissioned in 1956 by Thomas J. Watson, Jr to create IBM's first corporate-wide design program — indeed, these influential efforts, in which Noyes collaborated with Paul Rand and Charles Eames, have been referred to as the first comprehensive design program in American business.

Noyes also selected other notable architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Marco Zanuso and Marcel Breuer to design IBM buildings around the world.

An instance of this was the MoMA competition Organic Design in Home Furnishings, which was published in a book by the museum.

He was a strong advocate of functional Modernism and his work was firmly grounded in the tradition of Gropius, Breuer & Le Corbusier.

[2] The Harvard Graduate School of Design has established a professorship, called the "Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory".