His long career began in the 1950s when he designed cars for companies including Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Volkswagen, and BMW.

In the 1960s, he began designing furniture, and as of the 1970s, he expanded in numerous areas, ranging from household items such as ballpoint pens and television sets to uniforms and trucks and entire kitchens.

I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei's philosophy: my world is also round.Born in Berlin, Colani was the son of a Swiss film set designer[5][6] and a mother of Polish descent.

By the 1960s, his design range had also expanded to include household objects and furniture, beginning in 1963 with his elephant piggy bank, and in 1965 he gained worldwide success with furniture designs for Asko, Fritz-Hansen (Körperform chairs), Cor, and Kusch+Co.

[9] In 1968, for Thai Airlines, he developed a two piece plastic cutlery set which the Museum of Design, Zürich, added to its collection.

[10][full citation needed] He had developed a sufficient reputation and income by 1970 to establish a studio with a major design team at Harkotten Castle near Sassenberg, Germany.

In 1973, he made his first study trip to the Far East, during which Japanese buyers recognized Colani's potential.

About this time, the "Drop" teapot he designed for Rosenthal, a world leader in porcelain, was acquired for inclusion in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.

Later, in 1985, he unveiled the Pontresina propeller-driven airplane, having two contra-rotating coaxial pusher propellers with scimitar blades mounted in the tail.

By 1978, his revolutionary trucks, aircraft, car and ship studies had begun to be seen frequently at exhibitions worldwide.

The Colani Cormoran aircraft design was shown in mockup at the Paris Air Show In 1988 he opened offices in Toulouse and Bremen.

Lectures and demos included at Ford in Detroit, test drivwes on the Bonneville salt flats and the Art Center of Design in Passadena.

He mounted an exhibition at the Centre International de l'Automobile car museum in Paris and in 1993 held shopping center expositions through Switzerland.

Also in the decade, other designs included field glasses (1993); office furniture designs for Grahl, Michigan USA (1996); a new piano for famous piano builder Wilhelm Schimmel (1997); a water bottle design for Carolinen-Brunnen, Germany and a new microscope and photo camera (both 1998); and new shower (bathroom-combination)-generation for the German company Dusar and a furniture project with Kusch & Co., Germany (1999).

Celebrity owners of a Pegasus grand piano have included Prince, Lenny Kravitz, and Eddy Murphy.

In the realm of packaging design, he created a new bottle design for the leading Swiss mineral-water company Valser (acquired by Coca-Cola in 2002) and created porcelain giftware creations (Cappuccino, Espresso mugs).

He continued his large Supertruck designs with extreme streamlining, this time for Spitzer-Silo; the result was presented at the IAA in Hanover, Germany (2004).

In 2013 the first Model (AC22) of the AGOS Luxury Computer Series, Opus Magnum, was presented at the Nowa Zukunftsmesse in Marburg, Germany.

He lived together with Ya Zhen Zhao since the 1990s[24] and resided in Shanghai, China and Karsruhe, Germany.

His older son Bernard (*  1956) lives in Paris and works as a stock markert analyst.