car design thread

I agree 100%.
It's what I look for in student's work. Is it new? Do I recognize the brand?
Scored on both criteria.
Let's hope someone is going to break out of the 'me too' pack.

 

I'm let down by the BMW.
It's not that it's bad, but kind of an opportunity lost IMHO.

 

An interesting article on how car design works.
Mostly relevant.
https://www.roadster-life.com/blog/how-car-design-works-part-one

• Matteo Licata

How Car Design Works - Part One
Even the most knowledgeable car enthusiasts still have a kind of romanticized view of the job of a car designer and what entails. This is the first of a short series of articles in which I'll try to bust some myths and separate facts from misconceptions, all based on my own experiences in the field.
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Yours Truly in an old company video
Despite the fact that the car design profession and its importance for the success of a car company has never been more into the limelight, the process of actually designing a car and who does what is still very much unclear in the minds of even the more knowledgeable enthusiasts... Why?
Well, I’d say it’s nobody’s fault, actually: car manufacturers logically send out their top design managers to talk with the press, given that promote the company’s image and products is also part of their job. This means that what they are allowed to say has to be functional to the promotion of the latest “first ever” model and in tune with the overall company’s latest “disruptive” strategy... There’s really nothing to gain from exposing the inner workings of the machine as they are, it is simply in nobody’s interests.
Since I am not a car company and I got no new model to launch, I can finally shed some light onto how car design actually works, at least according to my own personal experience: in this installment I'll look into who designs what.
I’m sick of reading crap about my profession and I think that the current narrative is misleading to design students... As I’ve witnessed first-hand in my experiences as a design university lecturer.
I’ll start from the top of the rank and go down to the bottom, please bear in mind that this is a generic picture, there are differences between how each OEM is organized, but the big picture is mostly the same.
Let’s get cracking:
Design Director
Does not draw anything nor is he required to, and would not have time for it anyway.
Can have many titles (Design VP, Chief Design Officer etc.) but it’s the same thing: it’s one single person (usually a man, as this is still very much a male-dominated industry) that’s responsible for the activities of the design studio and has the final say (or should have...) over the look of each vehicle the company produces.
That’s not a small responsibility: a good “Design VP” is a key figure in the success of a car company, while a bad one can make lasting damage... That’s why Design VPs get high salaries and other desirable perks like travel the world first class for auto shows and being the one who becomes the “face” of the company’s design, taking the credit for pretty much everything, whether he actually likes that role or not.
The Design VP is an important person, but he has to be very smart and resourceful in the way he uses this power within the company to maximize results: there’s no great car design without an open and productive relationship between design and engineering, let alone without a relatively high degree of confidence and autonomy granted to the Design VP by the top management.
Get it right and design staff will be motivated, the best people will want to work for the company, cool cars will result and sales success is likely to follow.
Get it wrong and you get a Fiat Stilo.
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When things go wrong, badly wrong...
Usually exterior and interior design are separated as two different departments which of course communicate with each other (at least they should...) but have separate staff and their own directors:
Exterior Design Director
Does not draw, nor is he required to.
Wants to take the place of his boss. Badly.
There is a good reason the Exterior boss doesn’t draw: if he did, he would somehow stifle creativity, given that his sketch will become the pattern everyone follows.
The Exterior Design Director may get some media attention, depends on which policy the company he works for has.
Interior Design Director
Does not draw nor he is expected to, for the same reasons stated above. He too wants to take his boss’s place, but that’s less likely: Design Directors and upper management usually don’t give a damn about interiors, regardless of what they say publicly. This of course is not universal, but I’ve witnessed it in more than one place!
Below, in both exterior and interior designers, lay the “Senior” designers, and those do draw quite a lot, but depends very much on where the project they have been assigned to is: as these people are the experienced ones, some may get responsibility for the whole project and be no longer able to physically draw every detail of their own proposals. As the project inches towards production, it’ll be more overseeing modeling phases, deal with engineering and other departments... And of course oversee what the "Juniors" are doing!
"Junior designers" are those who sketch most of all: they have the less experience, but are fresh and creative (at least they should) and if all their bosses do their job properly, they’ll stay focused and motivated, producing cool material that will usually be discarded or watered down to homeopathic concentrations later in the development process, leaving space for More Of The Same®️ to take again its rightful place on the market. Sometimes a brilliant idea somehow still makes it to the production line though, and everyone in the process keeps striving for that to happen.
Car Designers fought a hard battle to get their foot in the door, and are among the "true believers" of the company, those who really want cool cars to happen.
Juniors become Seniors over an unspecified amount of years and work experience, in which they have ideally been through most of the phases of a production design project.
Coherence between Exterior and Interior design language is always pursued but rarely achieved, because it all goes out of the window when at a presentation the upper management asks to join together the features they like of the different interior "bucks" presented... Into a new one (happens all the time even with exterior designs...).
Lately the bigger companies have built "Components" department, in which group of designers develop the individual detail components of the Exterior of the Interior: headlights, alloys, handles... Or steering wheels and climate control buttons.
An even more recent development is the formation of so-called "HMI" departments, in which specialized professionals develop all that happens on the touchscreen all new cars have. That's a new field in car design, and one whose importance is still somewhat underestimated by design managers, despite declarations of the contrary.
Conclusions:
No production model is the result of the work of one person alone. If someone claims or is given credit to have designed a car, be skeptical until you are presented with evidence, in the form of relevant signed drawings from the project in question. Success has many fathers, and everyone still wants to be remembered like "the designer of ...", as the great masters of the past are.

 

How Car Design Works - Part Two
In my time I’ve been part of many projects and designed pretty much everything, so in this second installment I've decided to summarize the process of your average car design project.
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A younger Yours Truly entertaining the visitors of the 2015 Barcelona Motor Show
Saying "I'm a Car Designer" may sound almost too glamorous for its own good, but what it means, after all... Is an office job. You check in in the morning and check out in the evening much like most people in the world, except you have to have a sticker covering both of your phone's cameras.
It's what you do in your office hours that is different and very rewarding, at least most of the time. In my time I’ve designed engine covers, bumpers, grilles, rear view mirrors, many exterior design proposals... The lot! But I have to admit I’ve never got the chance to fully develop an exterior up to production or thereabouts, something I happen to have done quite a few times on interiors instead.
For this reason I’m going to write mostly about the design process of a car interior: the place where the customer passes most of its time yet often gets nowhere near the attention managers tend to give to exteriors during development... Which is not always a bad thing: because an interior is a more complex object than an exterior, being made of a greater variety of parts and materials, it is also much more difficult to “destroy” with a single sentence for the mostly unqualified (in design terms, obviously!) company CEO at a big design presentation. Of course this doesn’t mean you can do your job less than perfectly: it simply means the feedback you’ll receive will probably be more nuanced and any non-design-trained upper manager eventually present at the presentation will throw less random “suggestions” and thus interfere less with your own good work. Exterior designers often aren’t so lucky: because everyone experiences cars in their daily life in one way or another, seemingly everyone feels eminently qualified to pass judgement on a design team’s several month’s work!
At such high-level presentation, the role of the Design Director is very important as a “buffer” between the design teams, which take huge pride in their work and often take it personally, and the mood swings of the upper management. But I digress... Normally the interior design sketching phase starts a bit later than the exterior’s one, to give time to the exterior team to at least give the new car some semblance of a shape! How many different alternatives may be sketched and how many “filter” presentations the material goes through may vary according to different OEMs and even according to the time constraints of the single project. Once one or more designs get selected, more detailed drawings are made to support the first 3D modeling phase, where we encounter one of the figures that never get any publicity but has become the true backbone of car design projects: the digital modeler. In the car design field two surface modeling softwares are mainly used: Alias®️ by Autodesk and Icem Surf®️ by Dassault... Which is best between the two is an ongoing argument that’s far from settled and goes far beyond the scope of this post! Anyway, with the package measurements for the new car loaded into the 3D software, plus eventual carry-over components, plus all the needed drawings and sections made by the designer (or designers) present and accounted for, digital modeling can begin: that's a phase that will be closely monitored by the designers involved, making sure the digital model will look exactly "right".
Remember this is still early stage, so not everything will be 100% feasible just yet, but it is nevertheless a first “reality check”: given that most production cars are made on shared platforms that can last more than one model cycle, the big hard-points for our new swanky interior will be already there: the steel carrier upon which the dash and its systems are attached is likely to be already designed and present, as will the HVAC unit, which is the climate-control system... A big, costly component that’s always much bigger than the designer wants it to be and it is destined to survive many model cycles. Positioning of the passenger airbag is also an issue, as its positioning is crucial for it to work properly and usually can’t be changed all that much! Steering column positioning is also a given, together with the “envelope” of the various positions the assembly “steering wheel plus stalks and column plastic cover” will take in each of its possible adjustments: of course no interference is permitted! Seat frames are another hidden high-cost component that the manufacturer tries to reuse for as many model cycles as possible, so it’s likely to be carried over and only the foams and exterior trim will be redesigned... As it’s often the case for the steering wheel as well: the main steel core is usually retained while the exterior is redesigned. It’s a bit like a bakery that brushes some molten chocolate upon yesterday’s croissants to sell them off... But the end result can often be much “tastier”, if the designers make their job properly! By the way, from the 3D data the design models, or styling "bucks" will be milled, usually in clay parts fitted to a steel structure made according to the package measurements of the car. Two or three styling “bucks” will likely be presented, upon which the management will hopefully pick one favorite... Or, as often happens, demand to merge two proposals into one! Interior bucks at this stage are usually limited to the front seating area, where most of the design work is initially concentrated: dashboard and front door panels. At this stage, steering wheel and seats may still be off-the-shelf production items, put there just for show. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a scale model of an interior: there’s simply no way to properly evaluate an interior design without seeing it in life size and actually sitting on it, contrary to what happens with exteriors, which can be milled at quarter scale for an initial screening. No matter how much virtual reality technology has improved, in my humble opinion there’s no real substitute to looking at the models in the real world: not only gives me a kick every time, but it allows to properly judge how some styling features “work” in reality. For all the experience one may have, 3D software may still lead to overestimate the aesthetic impact of a certain surface change, chamfer or the like, because software are designed to visually magnify them to help you spotting eventual mistakes or defects. The clay phase is also very important because it gives the designer the opportunity to phisically modify the design buck, trying out some solutions or improvements that weren’t considered or not even thought about during the digital phase. Once a direction is chosen by the management, whatever that is, the buck is scanned and on that base the design team gets back to work repeating the process all over again, but in greater detail and concentrating more resources on the chosen design direction: one “lead” (a senior designer that’s responsible for the overall result) will oversee the work of the junior designers that are helping out on a lots of issues while keeping track of the 3D modelling, dealing with engineering and manufacturing issues and how the eventual late additions of features that weren’t originally planned (like a wireless phone charger or a bigger screen demanded for marketing reasons) end up impacting the design. Depending on how each OEM is structured, there will be more presentations and the model will get more detailed as time goes on, up until a full seating buck that looks and feels like the real deal can be made. Such bucks take a lot of man hours to make and can become very, very realistic if so desired: I’ve seen people breaking door handles on them because they thought it was real and used it to open the “door”. As time goes on all changes to the design become smaller, going into the details, the quality of the 3D model gets better, from C (styling in progress) to B then to A (“master” surfaces, used for making the production tooling). Another aspect in which how OEMs are organized may differ is the presence (or not) of specialized “components” departments: I remember that ten years ago I was drawing all kinds of stuff needed for "my" design proposal myself, from radio faces proposals down to the graphics of the dials, while in a more recent project the opposite happened: despite being the “lead” of the interior project I couldn’t even dare to pass judgement on stuff like steering wheel or gear knob proposals, as those were made by the “components” department... Heaven forbid if I encroached into the “component” boss’s territory... You know, big companies have their own internal structures and politics! As you can see, there are many people involved and many decisions being made in what is quite a long process, so it’s incorrect to state “this designer did this or that”... And yes, there will be a part three, stay tuned!

 

Automotive color history:

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/a-brief-history-of-car-colors-and-why-are-we-so-boring-now/

 

I've seen these analysis before. Where the 'Golden Ratio' is used to establish the profile architecture. You can't really go wrong with this process. I personally have never seen it utilized professionally, because the basic architecture was usually established before the designers had an opportunity to make architectural changes. More and more lately have been influenced by the designer's desire to get the proportions 'right' in the beginning. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

That's all well and good, but I never designed a car around that principal, but that's just me!
Nor did I ever see anyone design a car with that theory. But however you get there is fine by me. The end result is what counts.

 

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I like the Rolls grille.