car design thread

EXCLUSIVE: How Frank Stephenson Designed Everything From The Fiat 500 To The McLaren P1

https://www.hotcars.com/frank-stephensen-designer-interview-fiat-500-mclaren-p1/?fbclid=IwAR3ZGlTv3GKjyK9U1f9sUgqOBBvXH9ipUfsObkkoDUJ3TNBc6qWDpoFQ3PI

 

https://www.cnn.com/style/amp/giorgetto-giugiaro-interview/index.html?fbclid=IwAR332_dlMjVPRXcCvqjezXfBOAOAxn4V-dMU9fMITraqb8Vnwil6lUv10VU


Design
The unsung car designer who created the DeLorean and James Bond's underwater car
Updated 31st October 2019
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Credit: Vittoriano Rastelli/Corbis Historical/Corbis via Getty Images
Written by Jacopo Prisco, CNN
Few other designers have been as influential as Giorgetto Giugiaro in shaping modern automobiles. In a career spanning 64 years he has designed some of the most successful and influential cars in history, ranging from one-of-a-kind exotics to mass market utility vehicles.
He's designed over 200 cars for manufacturers around the world which collectively put over 60 million cars on the road and -- at the age of 81 -- is still working today. Having sold his design practice Italdesign in 2015, he continues to design, now with his son Fabrizio, under the roof of a new firm called GFG Style.
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14/17 – Ford Mustang Concept (2006)
Many styling elements from this 2006 concept car were referenced in the 2015 production series Ford Mustang. Credit: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/AFP/Getty Imag

 

How Three Italians Born In 1938 Changed Car Design Forever


Giorgetto Giugiaro, Marcello Gandini and Leonardo Fioravanti were all born the same year within 100 miles of each other. They became some of the most influential car designers of all time.

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BY BOB SOROKANICH
AUG 15, 2019

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KAGAN MCLEOD
Grab a pen and a map of Italy. Put a dot on Milan. Move west about 80 miles and mark Turin. Now slide 60 miles south and a smidge east. Plop a third dot on the village of Garessio, if you can find it. Link the three to form a triangle. You’d burn more ink connecting Portland, Bangor, and Bar Harbor, Maine, but when it comes to car design, this little area in Northern Italy might as well be the center of the universe. Each point is the hometown of a founding father of the wedge-shaped, mid-engine supercar: Leonardo Fioravanti of Milan, Giorgetto Giugiaro of Garessio, and Marcello Gandini of Turin. All were born in 1938, a few months and only 100 miles apart.

This story originally appeared in the July 2019 issue of Road & Track.

Name a sharp-nosed, mid-engine legend. Ferrari 512 BB? A Fioravanti masterpiece that defined that automaker’s golden era. Lotus Esprit? A Giugiaro design so enduring, every subsequent face-lift and overhaul across 28 years of production maintained the same shape and style. Lamborghini Countach? Gandini’s gift to the world of motoring and the bedroom-poster industry. If your favorite car has two seats, a midship engine, and a profile like a doorstop, it likely owes its existence to one of these three men. It’s enough to make you wonder what was in the water. How did this tiny triangle of Italian soil give rise to three titans of modern design? To find out, we asked the designers who’ve shaped some of our favorite modern sports cars, people like Chris Bangle, Ed Welburn, Ralph Gilles, Moray Callum, and more.

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The Fioravanti-designed Dino 206 GT.
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Fioravanti is responsible for an entire generation of iconic Ferraris. He trained as a mechanical engineer, focused on aerodynamics, and joined Pininfarina in 1964, straight out of school. He immediately started designing amazing machines. Name a memorable Dino or Ferrari of the past 50 years and you’re likely to land on a Fioravanti design. A partial list: the 1967 Dino 206 GT, the 1968 365 GTB4 Daytona, the 1975 308 GTB, the 288 GTO, the Testarossa, and the F40. All Fioravanti works. “I’m still surprised that Fioravanti was an engineer,” says Welburn, former head of global design at General Motors. “In general, engineers just don’t do creative, beautiful automobiles. And he did.”

Giugiaro apprenticed at Fiat, passed through Bertone and Ghia, and in 1968, founded his own design firm, Italdesign. He penned outrageous concept cars, such as the Bizzarrini Manta and Porsche Tapiro, exotics like the De Tomaso Mangusta and the Maserati Bora, and icons like the Esprit, the BMW M1, and the DeLorean DMC-12. He styled normal cars, too—he has called the Mk1 Volkswagen Golf of 1974 his best and most important design—in addition to Nikon cameras, Seiko watches, and Beretta firearms. “He showed the world that a mass-market product can have attractive and iconic design,” says Ralph Gilles, head of design at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.



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The Giugiaro-designed Mk1 Golf.
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Gandini joined Bertone in 1965, after Giugiaro left. The next year, he rocked the world with the debut of the Lamborghini Miura. It was the first road car with a mid-mounted V-12 engine, the original supercar. Four years later, Gandini showed the most radical concept car in history: the Lancia Stratos Zero, a sci-fi wedge. It inspired the production Lancia Stratos, a slightly more practical automobile that dominated rally racing. And of course, there’s the Countach. Hard to believe, but the totem of 1980s angular excess debuted in 1971, just five years after the voluptuous Miura. “For me,” says Mitja Borkert, current head of Lamborghini design, “everything that we do relates to the design DNA that the Countach gave us.” It wasn’t just Lamborghinis: Gandini penned the first BMW 5-series and the Renault 5 Supercinq, too.

Style is part of the bedrock of Italian culture. There’s a philosophy, fare bella figura. Directly translated, it means “to make a good figure”; in practice, it’s more like, “make an effort to be noticed” or “nail the first impression.” This is the nation that took something as universal as an evening stroll and elevated it to la passeggiata, a daily ritual of well-dressed, leisurely flaunting and flirting. “Just holding a pencil in this country makes you feel more creative,” says Bangle, BMW’s former design chief.

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Fioravanti's Berlinetta Boxer.
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The culture is also permeated by a reverence for aesthetics. “I think [Italians] have respected art and design probably longer than any other country,” says Callum, vice president of design at Ford. Early in his career, Callum worked at the Ford-owned design house Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin. He felt a major cultural difference almost immediately: In Italy, his chosen career held a place of honor that he’d never experienced growing up in Scotland. “Being an industrial designer in the U.K. is not seen as a really high, important job,” he says. “Whereas I think in Italy, they see the art side of life as being very, very important. I think that element of where you are in society really helps.”

It goes back generations. Italy’s carrozzerie, independent styling houses that designed and built bespoke automotive bodywork, grew from a tradition of horse-and-buggy coachbuilding. Trace the craft even further, and you end up in the Middle Ages, when Turin had a reputation for turning out the world’s most beautiful and stylish suits of armor.

“Metalworking has always been a primary craft there,” says Peter Stevens, designer of the McLaren F1 (and dozens of other cars). In his current role, teaching at London’s Royal College of Art, he emphasizes how Italy’s past helped to elevate the work of coachbuilding and, eventually, car design. “Unlike in other countries where metalworkers were seen as… the grumpy guys at the end of the village that you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry, in Italy that was seen as a really stylish thing that a family would be very proud of,” he says.



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The Gandini-designed Lamborghini Countach, arguably his masterpiece.
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The culture helped steer Fioravanti, Giugiaro, and Gandini toward car design. So did the timing of their births. Arriving in 1938 meant their earliest years were defined by the unimaginable destruction of World War II. Having survived, these young men entered automotive design in an era of unbridled innovation and postwar optimism.

Welburn marvels at what it must have been like growing up in that time and place. “You can imagine them as teenage boys, being excited about what’s going on. By age 20, which would be 1958, all three of these guys had reached [adulthood] at the exact same moment that Italian automobile design was on fire. And I don’t care what your interests were, you wanted to be a part of it.”

One more factor that influenced how Fioravanti, Giugiaro, and Gandini designed cars: plaster. Most automotive design departments build full-size models out of clay. The technique was pioneered by Harley Earl, the visionary who shaped General Motors design from the ’20s through the early ’60s. Earl grew up in Hollywood, and he swiped the modeling-clay trick from the movie industry. It’s a great way to quickly get a design off the page and into three dimensions, tweaking and editing the shape in real time via the addition or subtraction of material.

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Gandini penned the Carabo as a concept for Alfa Romeo. Many of its design cues reached production with the Lamborghini Countach.
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The carrozzerie didn’t use clay. They adapted the sculptor’s tradition of making a plaster maquette before taking chisel to stone. Fioravanti, Giugiaro, and Gandini all worked with master modelers, practicing a form of plasterwork that had been handed down through generations, and that tradition informed their designs.

These plaster modelers were “startlingly skillful fellows,” Stevens says, who could understand the shape you were looking for “by the way you waved your arms.” The plaster had limitations: It didn’t allow for really dramatic curves, and unlike clay, it offered less opportunity for rework. “In a way, the plaster method caused them to have a lot more discipline,” Stevens says, “because if you screwed up, you’d have to chop the whole lot off and start again.”

“The way they developed the shapes, I mean, it could have been 500 years ago, 800 years ago, 1000 years ago,” Welburn says. “It’s like they’re working on marble.” He mentions some quintessential wedge-shaped concept cars. “When I look at those long, lean surfaces, I can see the sculptors working in plaster on those cars. I can really see how plaster had an effect on what they were doing.”

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One of the wildest designs from Gandini: the Lancia Stratos Zero.
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Stevens says it wasn’t until the late ’80s that the American tradition of clay modeling made its way to Italy. “Now they all use exactly the same tools. They no longer seem to have that difference in Italy, which I always liked.”

Fioravanti, Giugiaro, and Gandini are all still alive and active in the design world. They aren’t easy to get ahold of. Some of this is due to language barriers, and some is likely by design. I tried to reach Giugiaro and Gandini with no success, but I did get to talk to Leonardo Fioravanti. He graciously dedicated the better part of a Saturday evening to our chat.

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The Giugiaro-designed Porsche Tapiro concept.
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The conversation was freewheeling and joyous, as wide-ranging as the man’s half-century-plus career. Fioravanti is a modest man, but his accomplishments cannot be diminished. The best instrument of personal freedom, he told me, is the car. That’s why his countrymen love them and why certain Italians have the ability to design them correctly. Fioravanti is the oldest of the trio—born in January of 1938, followed by Giugiaro and Gandini in August. Marcello and Giorgetto both love cars, Fioravanti said. And when you love cars, you stay young.

I asked him about the philosophy behind his designs. Start from function, he says. Function is the same thing anywhere in the world—a wheel must be round, a door must open. Then comes aesthetics, the way something appears to the eyes. Finally, the way that a person feels about the aesthetics? That’s style.

Perhaps in the beginning, he says, beauty is not so fascinating. Sometimes we get distracted by more flashy things. But after five, 10, 20 years, true beauty can only become more and more attractive. Italians have a natural approach to function, he says, to style and aesthetics and originality. They have the uncommon courage to pursue simplicity.

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Fioravanti mentioned the Ferrari Daytona (pictured above), an undeniably gorgeous design. He didn’t set out to make it beautiful when he created it. The first function of a Ferrari, he says, is to win. The car needed good visibility, good aerodynamics, an extraordinary engine. It won its class at Le Mans in 1972, 1973, and 1974. One year, Daytonas swept the first five places in their class at that legendary race. To Fioravanti, the car’s beauty is a result of how well it functioned in the crucible of motorsports.

To drive home his point, Fioravanti quoted Plato: Beauty is the splendor of truth. And if you begin with the truth, he says, there’s a good chance you’ll arrive at beauty.

It’s a philosophy embodied in every enduring design. It’s a guiding principle more powerful than culture, region, or era. It’s what allowed Fioravanti, Giugiaro, and Gandini to become the most important men in car design. In everything they did, they found truth. And from a tiny wedge of Italy, they gave it to the world.

 

The World’s Best-Looking Cars and the Houses that Designed Them


Form with function.

BY ANDREW CONNOR
AUG 6, 2015
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Italian design — with all its passion and soul — is so often fetishized in the automotive world that it has become a cliché (see: passion and soul). Yet it’s for a good reason — there’s no denying that the Italians have consistently produced some of the best-looking cars of the last century. And we’re not just talking Italian cars, either; auto brands from around the globe — England, Germany, Japan and even America — have come to the Italians for their automotive design expertise.

Pininfarina, Zagato, Bertone, Italdesign Giugiaro and Carrozzeria Ghia are the five big design houses, and odds are their designs comprise the majority of anyone’s “best-looking cars” list. Logic would dictate that because of these machines’ desirable looks, their prices are astronomical. While for the most part that is true, there are some designs that have slipped into the affordable range on the classic car scale and are still reminiscent of their more expensive and exotic brethren.

Pininfarina
Infamous Italian Design


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Pininfarina was founded by Battista “Pinin” Farina (who later changed his last name to Pininfarina) in 1930. Having collaborated closely with brands like Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Maserati and most famously Ferrari over the last 85 years, the name Pininfarina has become synonymous with good-looking cars. It’s Italy’s most well-known design house. Besides immaculate designs, the firm has also contributed greatly to innovative automotive manufacturing techniques, having pioneered unibody construction and aerodynamic testing utilizing full-sized wind tunnels.

Ferrari 330 GTS


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The Icon: The partnership between Ferrari and Pininfarina has produced an incredible amount of beautiful cars, and the 330 GTS is without a doubt one of the best. Shortly after the 330 GTC debuted at the 1966 Geneva Motor Show, the GTS was unveiled as the open-top “spider” that — apart from the roadster profile — was identical to the coupe. The car’s body was assembled by Pininfarina in Turin before being shipped to Ferrari for the mechanicals, and its clean and elegant lines and details are emblematic of the design house’s language during the ’60s — from the round headlights and oval grille at the front to the tapered “boat-tail” rear end. Only 99 330 GTSs were built and thus they command a lot of money at auction — in 2014, an original (but dilapidated) 330 GTS sold for over $2 million.

Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto


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The Alternative: Yes, the car was Dustin Hoffman’s costar in The Graduate and that role put it on the map, but there’s more to the Alfa Romeo Spider than its filmcameo. The Spider was a product of various design studies and concepts from the ’50s and early ’60s, most notably the Alfa Romeo Superflow IV. The Alfa Spider ultimately eschewed the concept’s fixed roof, but retained some of the major design elements like the covered headlights and “osso di seppia” (Italian for cuttlebone) rear end. The Spider was the final design attributed fully to Battista Pininfarina, who died less than a month after the car debuted to the public at the Geneva Motor Show in 1966. The Spider was made all the way up until 1994, and thus its lack of rarity has made it a bargain, with later cars going for four figures. But it’s the Series 1 cars (1966-1969) that represent the car at its most elegant, and those come at a premium — expect to pay between $35,000 to $50,000 for a well-sorted car.

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Gruppo Bertone
On the Forefront of Wedge


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In the late ’60s and early ’70s, wedges were the future. While a couple Italian design houses helped pioneer the wedge movement, no one did it better than Bertone. In many ways Bertone’s distinctive design language was a result of their extensive work with Lamborghini, which yielded legendary cars like the Miura and the Countach, but Bertone’s distinctive cues made it on to Fiats, Citroens and even Volvos over the decades to come.

Lancia Stratos


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The Icon: The Lancia Stratos has the distinct honor of being one of the most successful and most beautiful cars in rally racing. It was spawned from Bertone’s Stratos Zero concept, a result of the “design wars” between Bertone and Pininfarina to see who could build the lowest concept car. The resulting Zero was not only lower than Pininfarina’s Modulo concept, it was also a fully drivable machine. Nuccio Bertone drove the Zero to a meeting with Lancia’s top-brass to hammer out a deal and — so it is told — drove it right under the security gates, earning the applause of the Lancia team. The Zero’s design eventually became the Stratos — a rare gem with a price that reflects that: they usually sell for over $500,000.

Fiat X1/9


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The Alternative: The Fiat X1/9 was designed and built right around the same time as the Stratos Zero and Lancia Stratos, and the resemblance shows. Marcello Gandini, the man behind the Stratos, was also the lead designer for the X1/9 and penned the design as a replacement for the Fiat 850 Spider (also a Bertone design). While the overall wedge shape, pop-up headlights and mid-engine design was reminiscent of the Stratos, its puny 1.3-liter engine didn’t even make a horsepower figure in the triple digits, and thus it’s become a bit of a lost oddball in automotive history. That’s good news for you, though: While the Stratos’ price continues to skyrocket, a pristine X1/9 can be yours for less than $10,000.

Zagato
Inspired by Aircraft


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Following a career in aeronautics, Ugo Zagato decided to turn his attention to cars in the late 1910s. Cars at the time were relatively heavy and bulky, so using his experience crafting planes, he aimed to build cars that would be both lightweight and aerodynamic. His drive to create lithe cars garnered the attention of Alfa Romeo who asked him to build a body for the Alfa 6C 1500 that would place second in the 1927 Mille Miglia. Zagato would continue to build early racers, building bodies for an impressive 36 cars that would compete in the 1938 Mille Miglia.

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Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato


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The Icon: In an effort to step up their racing program, Aston Martin signed a deal with Zagato to re-body their existing DB4 GT — already a race-ready version of the original DB4 grand touring car. By using more aluminum and removing unessential body parts (such as the bumpers), Zagato removed around 100 pounds from the DB4 GT and rounded out the car’s overall proportions to create a streamlined, aerodynamic profile. The improved DB4 wasn’t the racing success Aston Martin hoped for, but it was one of the most exciting designs to ever roll out of Zagato’s Milan facility. Only 25 DB4 GT Zagatos exist, of which 19 are originals, and six are factory-sanctioned recreations. Even the recreations sell for over a million dollars, with an even higher premium for the originals.

Lancia Fulvia Sport Zagato


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The Alternative: Like the DB4 Zagato, the Lancia Fulvia Sport Zagato was a lighter, more aerodynamic take on a preexisting car by Zagato. The Fulvia Sport Zagato was based on the Lancia’s V4, front-wheel-drive Fulvia, a car that — like many other Lancias — was as ingeniously engineered as it was an oddity. The Sport Zagato version eschewed the original Fulvia’s three-box design for a more aerodynamic, fastback profile, and the edges were rounded out. The result is a car that doesn’t have the traditionally handsome looks of the DB4 Zagato, but is nevertheless a striking design. The Fulvia Sport Zagato was built in large numbers and is thus a reasonably priced collectable. Expect to pay somewhere between $30,000 to $50,000, with nowhere for the prices to go but up.

Italdesign Giugiaro
Good Design for the Masses


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Giorgetto Giugiaro’s company Italdesign is the youngest of the five big Italian design houses, but that doesn’t make its designs any less prolific. While most design houses built flagship sports cars and limited-edition specials, Giugario’s designs made their way onto more pedestrian cars like the Volkswagen Scirocco, Fiat Panda and Isuzu Impulse, bringing good automotive design to the mass market. That isn’t to say Giorgetto Giugiaro’s genius didn’t breed more exotic designs; he’s still the man behind the look of the DeLorean DMC-12.

BMW M1


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The Icon: The BMW M1 is best known as the company’s first and, until the introduction of the i8, only mid-engined production car. It was originally intended for sports-car racing and was the product of a botched partnership between BMW and Lamborghini. Lamborghini had to pull out of the project due to financial troubles, but the car eventually made it to production. The final design was penned by Giorgetto Giugario, who was told to retain BMW’s styling cues. The only parts reminiscent of BMW’s sport sedans were the kidney grille and “Hofmeister Kink”, but admittedly the final M1 takes heavy inspiration from BMW’s 1972 Turbo concept, designed by head BMW designer Paul Bracq. Only 453 M1s were built, and if you want to own one, they’ll cost at least half a million USD.

Lotus Esprit


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The Alternative: The Lotus Esprit’s development more or less coincided with the M1’s during the most prolific years of Giorgetto Giugario’s “folded paper” design language and it shows: the overall shape of the two cars are nearly identical, apart from BMW’s design details. The Esprit enjoyed a hearty 28-year run and, while it underwent multiple design changes from different designers, the same basic wedge shape remained. However, the cars built from 1976 to 1987 are the ones that were technically Giugiaro’s design and — frankly — are the best looking of the lot. They may not be as quick as the M1 (or even the post-1987 iterations of the Esprit), but at prices ranging from the low $20,000s to the mid $30,000s it’s a great, classic Giugetto design at a fraction of the M1’s cost.

Carrozzeria Ghia
Supersonic Style


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Like Zagato, Giacinto Ghia’s aim when he founded Ghia in the mid 1910s was to build lightweight aluminum cars for early road racing. He even bodied an Alfa 6C — also like Zagato — that won the 1929 Mille Miglia. The firm has undergone numerous ownership changes, including coach builder Felice Mario Boano, race-car driver Alejandro de Tomaso and currently Ford Motor Company. But between 1954 and 1963, under the leadership of Luigi Segre, Ghia came into its own. Around this time designer Giovanni Savonuzzi penned the “Supersonic” design language: swoopy, rocket-inspired lines that have spawned some of Ghia’s most iconic design work.

Fiat 8V Ghia Supersonic


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The Icon: When Savonuzzi created the “Supersonic” body it was only intended for one car: an Alfa Romeo 1900 racing in the 1953 Mille Miglia. That car literally crashed and burned in the event, but the body design ended up on 19 other cars and set the tone for Ghia’s future products. 15 of those were built on the Fiat 8V chassis, while three more ended up on a Jaguar XK120 and one on an Aston Martin DB2/4 — all the cars had nearly identical bodies, only the underlying mechanicals varied. The body is inspired by aviation, with a grille reminiscent of a jet air intake and rear fins that are admittedly more restrained than its American Jet Age brethren. Want one? It’ll cost you over $1 million at auction.

Volkswagen Karmann Ghia


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The Alternative: In need of a high-end car after WWII, Volkswagen went to German coach-builder Karmann to create a car based on the Beetle with a little more pizazz. Karmann, in turn, went to Ghia for the design. Taking inspiration from their prior Chrysler D’Elegance project (penned by Virgil Exner), Luigi Segre redesigned the same lines and profile to fit the Volkswagen Beetle chassis. The result is one of the best-looking Volkswagens of all time. The flowing, clean lines of the Karmann Ghia don’t look as dramatic as Savonuzzi’s Supersonic coupes, but the styling was no less a hit. The car is one of Ghia’s most widely produced designs, and as such doesn’t cost a whole lot. A clean example will run you anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000.

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The Truth Behind Why Pop-Up Headlights Are Banned


https://www.hotcars.com/the-truth-behind-why-pop-up-headlights-are-banned/?utm_source=HC-FB-P&utm_medium=Social-Distribution&utm_campaign=HC-FB-P&fbclid=IwAR1ln-GRsbqpLQC6CTWHkW9FhXVNGwin-k2OmrGlcgCF8I2HeKKQidPsbWU

 

I would agree Andrew. Over the years, they've done some interesting designs, but I would never put them in the same category as Giugiaro, Pininfarina or Bertone.

 

I thought English wasn't her first language, hence some of the awkward phrases.

 

A picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that. This pretty much sums it up with a simple graphic.
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A Front-Row Seat to 70 Years of Automotive Design

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/pursuits/robert-cumberford-automobile-magazine-critic-becomes-authority-on-style?fbclid=IwAR3Zu_XZRLLlzjEkqZYy2lTt4KorzrsvXxl5mTCQTV6PBaaqpj-lJ3ElDnE
Copyright © BloombergQuint

 

Thanks! But it's all the readers and contributors that keep it going.
I love this stuff!
I do wish that more readers would contribute/comment, but overall the car business is driven by design. Or at least it should be.

 

Maybe some day I'll tell my RC stories, but for now, discretion is indeed the better part of valor.

 

Not automotive or Ferrari related, but design focused. say what you want about Apple & their products, but design has driven their enormous success since Mr. Jobs started the company.
DESIGN | 9 DEC 2021 | BY JONATHAN BELL | PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON SCHMIDT
Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech
Global exclusive! Led by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, the Apple Design Team holds enormous sway over our evolving relationship with technology. Opening the doors to their studio at Apple Park in Cupertino for the first time, they offered us a deep dive into the working processes behind their latest creations



A view from the fourth-floor corridor, facing the outer ring of Apple Park. Designed by Foster + Partners, the circular campus features a series of light-filled lobbies opening up on a large park planted with 9,000 trees

In the distance is a rectangular frame of foliage. In the foreground, a conference table, placed with architectural rigour so that the focal point is dead centre of the screen. The scene is a tiny cross section through Apple Park, the tech giant’s mighty circular HQ in Cupertino, by Foster + Partners. There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Working side by side to guide this division are Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design. Both close colleagues, confidants and friends of Jony Ive, they effectively took the helm of the Design Team after his departure from the chief design officer role in 2019.

Today they’re both here to talk Wallpaper* through the past few years at Apple, a time of consistent growth, both in terms of products shipped and revenue earned. Apple is a behemoth in every sense of the word, generating $366bn in revenue in 2020, over half of which came from the iPhone, the world’s best-selling handset every year since 2016 (it’s estimated that over a billion iPhones have been sold to date). From television to headphones to watches, growth was experienced right across the company.

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Members of the Design Team gather near the central library to discuss the Apple Watch
Yet despite the millions and billions, there is still a strong sense of the personal touch about Apple’s products, a design ethos that can be traced back to the company’s earliest days. For designers such as Hankey and Dye, the challenge is to parlay the colossal responsibilities of such a footprint into a mutually beneficial future that serves customers and shareholders without depleting resources and hastening climate change.

Power brings responsibility, but also the ability to instigate change. In summer 2020, Apple promised to become fully carbon neutral by 2030, decarbonising its supply chain, seeking out sub-contractors that rely on renewable energy and recyclable materials, and finding the right balance between product longevity and component circularity.

It’s been three years since the Apple Design Team moved into its new premises. Located just over a mile from the company’s previous HQ down the road at Infinite Loop, the awe-inspiring circular campus is a fine analogy for the dizzying complexity of modern electronics devices.

Inside Apple Park with Apple Design Team
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Evans Hankey, VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design, in the Design Studio
From a distance, all is sleek and seamless, with barely a hint of what lies beneath the quarter-kilometre-long façade. However, it is a 260,000 sq m machine of massive complexity. From the natural ventilation systems to the multilayered glazing, from the bespoke door handles to the 9,000 carefully specified trees, every single facet of this multibillion-dollar structure has been subjected to the kind of scrutiny most designers can only dream of.

It’s the same with the device in your pocket. Seventeen years after Ive created the first iPhone prototype, the latest generation iPhone 13 hasn’t lost any of the magical tactility and sensory delight of its forebears. Outwardly, the iPhone embodies meticulous minimalism: tap the surface and myriad worlds are revealed, just like at Apple Park.

Ive was intensely involved with the building’s design (as was Steve Jobs during the project’s early stages). The team before us now very much reflect the realisation of the two men’s aspirations for a bespoke Apple building. ‘[The Apple Design Team] can share the same studio,’ Ive told Wallpaper* in 2017. ‘We can have industrial designers sat next to a font designer, sat next to a sound designer, who is sat next to a motion graphics expert, who is sat next to a colour designer, who is sat next to somebody who is developing objects in soft materials.’

All this has come to pass and more. Yet Hankey stresses that it didn’t happen overnight. ‘We knew very much that this was a massive opportunity, but we also knew that it also had to be more than just adjacencies,’ she says of their new-found centralisation. ‘We got to where we were as a team because of our cultures and our processes. It was a challenge, not an automatic win. It really took a lot of time to try new things out and be a little bit outside our comfort zones.’

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The limited-edition cover created by the Apple Design Team for the January 2022 issue of Wallpaper* (W*273), where a version of this story appears. Buy this issue, and subscribe to receive limited-edition covers every month
Hankey and Dye are adamant that the team wouldn’t be what it was without the deep-rooted cultural bias towards design in Apple. ‘We care about making great products, but we’ve worked equally hard at making a great team and culture. A lot of that came from the beginning. Steve defined Apple by its design,’ says Dye. ‘We always remember him saying that design is not just a veneer. It’s not just how things look, it’s about how things work. After three years [at Apple Park], we couldn’t believe more in the vision of having one central Design Team across all Apple products.’

From the outset, Apple’s aesthetic ethos set it apart. Arguably, the company has done more to democratise the understanding and perception of design, both in its physical manifestation and as a way of guiding and shaping behaviours. Apple designs are globally ubiquitous, yet at no point has the quality of execution ever dropped. Instead, the rest of the world has had to raise its game to catch up. Sure, there have been the occasional rare missteps, and while these might have triggered some internal soul-searching, Apple is not a company for public mea culpas. Learn, improve and move on.

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A host of central tables in Apple Park enables impromptu gatherings
Dye and Hankey frequently use the word ‘humility’, especially when Apple is entering new market spaces. While new category killers such as Apple Watch and AirPods might appear effortless and fully formed from the outset, the work behind the scenes was staggering. Take the Human Factors Team, which blends experts in ergonomics, cognition and behavioural psychology. When AirPods’ development began a decade or so ago, human factors researcher Kristi Bauerly found herself researching the ‘crazily complex’ human ear.

‘We moulded and scanned ears, worked with nearby academics, focusing on outer ears for the earbud design and inner ears for the acoustics,’ she says. Thousands of ears were scanned, and only by bringing them all together did the company find the ‘design space’ to work within. ‘I think we’ve assembled one of the largest ear libraries anywhere,’ Hankey says. ‘The database is where the design starts,’ Bauerly continues, ‘and then we iterate and reiterate.’

New products have led to new specialisms and Apple Park was designed to accommodate this growth and cross-pollination. The ability to sketch, model and prototype in-house creates a fluid workflow that is integral to product evolution. Prototyping is hugely important, covering everything from scale and interaction down to materials, colours, textures, and surfaces.

Processes behind the products
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Top and above, a model maker assembles camera modules for iPhone 13 Pro camera lenses into cosmetic models. Multiple section models of iPhone cameras are created to study each detail
For Apple Watch, the team had to design, build, and implement a physical notification system. How strong? How long? What felt natural? ‘We knew that the Watch was going to be the most intimate, the most personal product that we’ve ever made,’ says Hankey. ‘We also knew it needed to get your attention at some point.’ It was Duncan Kerr, a long-standing member of the Design Team, who suggested the idea of the ‘tap’. ‘It’s such a lovely simple thing, but we had no idea how to bring that to life,’ Hankey says. Through a series of clunky prototypes and the work of haptics expert Camille Moussette, the ‘tap’ was refined and perfected.


Industrial design is by its nature multidisciplinary, although individual expertise is obviously hugely valuable. There are team members who are as adept at coding as they are at three-dimensional design, but in general, the most useful quality – beyond skill and aptitude – is a sense of curiosity. ‘We have this tradition of making things for one another at Christmas,’ says Hankey. ‘It’s about that joy of making and joy of giving. It’s something that’s come from the culture of the team.’

An awareness of craft and construction is essential, for there is an acute responsibility that comes with shaping objects that will be made in the hundreds of millions. The economies of scale and the power of the brand give Apple a powerful platform from which to implement change.

Yet even something as superficially simple but environmentally beneficial as removing the plastic shrink-wrap from an iPhone box induces a paroxysm of self-examination within the team. How can the unboxing experience be maintained? Can it be made more accessible? The problem was mulled over, pulled apart and ultimately solved with an elegant paper tab mechanism. The change will save around 600 metric tonnes of plastic over the life of the product.

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A model maker assembling a digital crown onto an Apple Watch Series 7
Other disciplines have more tangible compulsions. Take typography, something deemed inconsequential and quaint to most early computer pioneers. Not Steve Jobs. Recognising the personal computer’s rapidly advancing ability to display graphics and text to the same visual standards as print, Jobs insisted that the Macintosh debuted with familiar fonts, notably Helvetica and Times New Roman. It also included Apple-specific fonts such as Chicago, Toronto and Geneva. Eventually, Apple developed the TrueType font standard that still prevails today.

‘Apple has had a very special relationship with typography for a long time,’ Dye acknowledges. Lance Wilson, one of the Design Team’s typographic specialists, was one of the people behind San Francisco, the neo-grotesque typeface that shipped with the first Apple Watch in 2014 and was eventually rolled out with iOS 9 and OS X. The first bespoke Apple font in a quarter of a century, San Francisco has to do a lot, especially on the small-screen real estate of the Apple Watch. Owing a stylistic debt to Helvetica, San Francisco goes further, working across 150 languages and evolving into variants, including SF Rounded, SF Mono and a 3D version used for Apple Pay.

Apple and typography
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Dye and two graphic designers discuss the development of the SF and SF Symbols typefaces
‘One of the benefits of designing both the typeface and the platforms it’s displayed on is that we can define how the two work together,’ says Wilson. The result is a scalable font capable of accommodating different weights and spacing depending on the point size. San Francisco also set in motion the wholesale redesign of Apple’s symbol set. The SF Symbols app offers developers over 100,000 symbol combinations, with dynamic resizing, multiple weights, and orientations, all intended to ‘create continuity between hardware and software’, in Wilson’s words.

New York, the system serif font, was introduced in 2019, and displays similar capabilities. Both are available to Apple’s 30 million-strong developer community, with their in-built typographic rulebook helping preserve the visual consistency that defines the brand. Wilson and his team also worked on the upgraded fonts for Apple’s ongoing partnership with Hermès, digitally remastered from the French maison’s original horological lettering.

‘It was a lovely collaboration because they have the same appreciation and care and interest in things like typography,’ he explains. Susan Kare’s cursive ‘hello’ graphic, one of the iconic images of the first Macintosh, was the inspiration behind the cursive font created for the spring 2021 launch of the new iMac. The spline-based font has integral connectivity, with each letterform perfectly aligning with the next, just like real handwriting.

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Top, machining the IO on the aluminium unibody enclosure of the new Macbook Pro. Above, interior view of an iPhone 13 Pro prototype
Just as the implementation of typography is embedded into the wider Apple ecosystem, so the company’s approach to photography illustrates the in-house attitude towards building a better tool – only here it’s a far larger canvas. As Dye points out, the iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. ‘That’s a pretty heavy thing to process,’ he admits. Used by everyone from working professionals to complete amateurs, the latest iteration of the iPhone camera and software exemplifies the cross-disciplinary approach. The iPhone 13’s camera represents a substantial upgrade, with Pro models getting a triple-lens system with a macro mode and 6x optical zoom.

Reimagining photography
As UI designer Johnnie Manzari explains, the camera now has a new portraiture mode for photos and a cinematic mode for movies. Both exploit the emotional aesthetics of shifting depth perception. ‘It feels much more human and there’s more of a connection to it, even though it’s an artefact of analogue photography,’ says Dye. ‘We did a lot of research into the history of portraiture as an art form and a craft, going back to oil painting and how they informed photographic traditions,’ Manzari says. ‘The insights we got were about the importance of the focus on the eyes, the treatment of the background and lighting. These led to the features we’ve added to the iPhone over the years, which balance these timeless principles in a way that’s accessible and more intuitive.’

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The focus on photography obviously had an impact on hardware design, both in terms of how the lenses are grouped and delineated, but also the way in which the camera software evokes the incremental dials of traditional analogue equipment. All this required an immense amount of research, studying, and photographing vintage cameras, from their materials down to the typefaces and layouts on the cases. A new font, SF Camera, was created, complete with a ‘boxy’, analogue feel. The Photos app not only serves as a one-stop post-production facility but has become more sophisticated in its ability to curate and serve up specific memories, ‘a magical way to rediscover and relive’, according to human interface designer Nicole Racquel Ryan. ‘Memories can identify people and places, and package them up into this beautiful cinematic movie to play back.’ It’s immersive nostalgia, one more way in which our devices can insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of our lives.

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Industrial Design Team members discussing colour, alongside the new iMac
Accessibility and inclusiveness are vital components of the Design Team’s work. ‘I think the team really does understand that we can make our work so much better by partnering with and learning from experts. We’re very willing to learn, whether it’s from photographers or cinematographers, or in many other areas,’ says Dye. From working with disability groups to ensure an iPhone can be used by the visually or hearing impaired, to developing a system of emojis to accommodate all forms of representation and self-identification, the team must engage to evolve.

As the processing capability of devices increases, so does the scope of the designer. The research behind the spatial awareness system that powers the Apple AirTag involved a suite of motion capture cameras, tracking devices through space and honing the way they interacted with each. This also led to the seamless virtual ‘handshake’ between the iPhone and HomePod Mini, as the latter takes over streaming duties as you approach it.

Evolving the Apple Watch
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Central to the Design Studio are picnic tables where collaborative discussions take place
Technology is becoming more intimate. The infinite variety of emojis is one thing, but giving the customer choice and personality within the context of a mass-produced industrial object is quite another. This was the challenge of the Watch. ‘Apple Watch is such a great example of the work that we do collectively in the studio,’ says Hankey. The Apple Watch Series 7 increases screen size by 20 per cent to cover practically the entire face of the watch. This was clearly a design goal from the outset, but could only be achieved through iterative, incremental evolution of the product, as well as a close relationship with the engineering team. The Apple Watch also has its unique input device, the Digital Crown. ‘We wanted to merge software and hardware,’ says designer Molly Anderson. ‘The crown came from referencing the history of watches and realising we needed to have physical mechanisms and tactile inputs to make Apple Watch feel really different from the idea of an iPhone on the wrist.’

The range of faces are tailored to personal requirements, with the caveat that it is a watch, first and foremost, so the time is always visible. Likewise, the ability to swap Apple Watch bands of different materials and colours is facilitated by a consistent connecting mechanism. The Solo Loop bands are sized like shoes to ensure a comfortable, personal fit. Not only were materials specialists brought onto the team, but the company’s health and fitness division had to be established as it became clear that the device could do so much more. ‘We realised you would interact with it very differently from anything else we’ve done,’ says Hankey. ‘We knew health was always going to be one of many components of the Apple Watch ecosystem, but we had no idea how important it would become.’

Apple Park: the ultimate tool
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An audio designer creates custom sounds in the Design Studio sound lab
Arguably Apple put the ‘personal’ into personal computer, transforming the PC market with objects that gave back a sense of interaction with their user. Decades before we started talking to our devices, the Macintosh booted up with a happy, smiling face. This, it said, was going to be OK. For consumers, this might feel like ancient history, but for the Design Team, it was where the seeds of innovation, collaboration, and disruption were sown. ‘So much of what we value for the team and for the company, really started in the early days of design at Apple,’ says Hankey. ‘We cannot overstate how lucky we are to be at a company with such a rich and deep foundation. From the very early “think different” mantra to Steve and Jony’s collective focus on craft, care and making tools, to their reverence for the creative process, this is what still drives us.’

At the heart of it all is Apple Park. Hankey and Dye enthuse about the qualities of the space. ‘It’s been designed for serendipitous meetings as well as collaboration,’ Hankey says. ‘It’s just so quiet and calming. We never really understood what that would mean for us until we’d been here for a while.’ In Apple Park, the Apple Design Team has found the ultimate tool, a place where technology’s ever-evolving role in society is researched, dissected, developed, and designed before being transformed into physical reality. §

 

Imagine—Automobile Concept Art
February 4, 2022Leave a commentArtwork and Books
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Imagine—Automobile Concept Art from the 1930s to the 1980s
The golden age of American automobile design is universally considered to be from the 1940s to the early 1970s, an innovative period for the country’s automobile manufacturers and for the artists who designed and styled the cars of the future. The goal was to sell more cars primarily by employing artists to create vehicles with ‘eye appeal’ for the buying public. There were many thousands of drawings of these futuristic models, but almost all have been lost or purposely destroyed by the manufacturers to minimize copying. The eye-catching images shown in this book have been gathered together over the last 15 years and now form part of The Kelley Collection. They are rare survivors and illustrate the work of the men and woman who drew and designed the cars from their early days at art school and during their employment with the ‘Big Three’ US automobile manufacturers. These artists have been almost forgotten and this book honors them for their contributions and imagination. The reader is taken back to earlier times when the sky was the limit, dreams and vision were encouraged and restrictions were few. Eighty-seven individual artists are represented here with 235 wonderfully unique images.

Author: Patrick G. Kelley
Publisher: Dalton Watson Fine Books, Deerfield, Illinois 60015, USA
ISBN: 978-1-85443-306-0
Publication Date: August 2019
Page Size: 219 mm x 290 mm, landscape, hard cover 324 pages
Price: Signed and numbered limited edition of 100: US$135/£110. Regular Edition: US$90/£75
Sample Pages: Click here.
Ordering and information: Click here.



Sample Images

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The Citroen DS shows up again as one of the all time great designs.

https://www.yankodesign.com/2022/02/06/best-car-designs-according-to-the-styling-legend-fabio-filippini/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
BEST CAR DESIGNS ACCORDING TO THE STYLING LEGEND FABIO FILIPPINI
BY PETER LYON 02/06/2022



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We talk to Fabio Filippini – Ex-Pininfarina design director and author of ‘Curve.’

BACKGROUND
Over the past 35 years, Italian design guru Fabio Filippini has worked as an influential car designer for such automakers as Volkswagen, Audi, Groupe Renault, and other international car makers in countries ranging from Italy to France or Spain and China to Japan, before taking up a position as Pininfarina design director from 2011. He is best-known for his work on the Mitsubishi Minica, Audi A8, Kangoo 2, Mégane III, Clio 4, Twingo III, Espace V, as well as concept cars including the Pininfarina Cambiano and Sergio, BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso, the hydrogen-powered H2Speed and the Fittipaldi EF7 Vision Gran Turismo. He has also dabbled in the design of alternate transportation vehicles like the Eurostar e320 train and the Zetor Concept Tractor. For his design work, Filippini has received numerous awards such as the ‘Interior Design of the Year’ in 2012 and the National Innovation Award for the Pininfarina Cambiano, and ‘Best Design Study’ for his Pininfarina Sergio at the 2013 Autonis Design Awards.

In 2018, he moved to Tokyo where he currently works as an independent car designer and design strategy adviser. Besides his professional design duties, he also serves as an international judge at the world’s most renowned classic car concours such as Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and Salon Privé.
In late 2021, Filippini toured Europe to launch ‘Curve,’ his new book on automotive design. I caught up with Fabio recently for a chat about his work, his thoughts on design, and his book.

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INTERVIEW
Peter Lyon (PL) – Firstly, congratulations on the launch of your book. I must say that once you start flicking through its pages, your book is hard to put down. The illustrations are exquisite. Are they all your own work?

Fabio Filippini (FF) – Thank you. Yes, I drew all of those drawings and sketches. I’m glad you like them.

PL – The book’s introduction looks intriguing and should capture the attention of every student of automotive design out there. It says “What does an iPod and a Renault have in common? Why was Le Corbusier creating innovative architecture but driving a car with decidedly antiquated lines? How does the car industry react to changes in society and its impact on the environment? The illustrated essay ‘Curve’ by Fabio Filippini brings together the history of car design with the personal and professional experiences of the author.
This is a book that talks about the essence of the car and the path that leads to its creation with unprecedented passion, competence, and originality.”

FF – There is a lot of history in this book. And a lot of passion.

PL – Speaking of passion and originality, I’m interested to hear what you consider to be the best five car designs ever?

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Image – BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso

FIVE BEST CAR DESIGNS according to Fabio Filippini
1. Ferrari 512s Modulo Pininfarina
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That’s a tough one. Okay, let me start with the Pininfarina Modulo based on the Ferrari 512S from 1970. This was an extremely special Berlinetta, an experimental one-off prototype penned by Paolo Martin for the 1970 Geneva Motor Show. When it came out it looked more like a spaceship than a car. It matched perfectly the mood of the time to come. The first sketches appeared in 1967 before man had landed on the moon. And of course, at that time, Stanley Kubrick was still preparing his ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie. If you look at the Modulo, it could so easily have appeared in Kubrick’s film. This Pininfarina concept and ‘2001’ were the top expressions in different fields of this futuristic vision at that time. And the car still looks futuristic today.

2. Citroen DS
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My second car would be the Citroen DS. It was so advanced when it appeared in 1955. There was nothing like it. And still today, it is still much more modern than most contemporary cars. The shape, the space inside is big and comfortable. Aerodynamically it was fantastic and so modern with its fiberglass roof. But strangely, no one copied it. In the years after that, no other carmaker took inspiration from the DS. It influenced no one. Not even new technology like the unique hydraulic suspension influenced other carmakers. It was beautiful but seemed to be an anachronism.

3. Fiat Panda
Next is the Fiat Panda designed by the legendary Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign in 1980. It’s like Muji-style philosophy applied to cars 20 years before the Muji brand was born. I like the proportions. It’s purposeful, functional, thoughtful and refined. It’s a masterpiece in simplicity by Giugiaro.

4. Nissan Silvia
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Obviously, I could also add the Lamborghini Miura and Ferrari Dino to my list but that would be too obvious. I’d much rather add a Japanese car that was launched around the same time I first arrived in Tokyo. Now this car might not be one of the most beautiful cars ever, but it’s a car I really love, even 34 years after its launch— it’s the Nissan Silvia (S13) from 1988. This Silvia was so beautiful that it almost looked like a Pininfarina-styled car. It was low-slung with nice proportions, had very clean styling, and had good balance. It was a very Italian-looking car. There is a subtlety with the treatment of the front fender that not many people recognize. But as a designer, I look at it and I like to see the subtle twisting effect on the fender and hood.

5. Porsche 911
Now, where would a top 5 list be without the Porsche 911? Basically in any of its iterations, starting with the original air-cooled model in 1964 right through to the current 992 Series, it’s an automotive masterpiece. To me, the 911 is not only a brilliant technical evolution but also a perfect representation of good and timeless design going through the ages. While the 911 is an icon, I will not include the 996 version which I consider to be a heavy makeup caricature.

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Image – Fittipaldi EF7 concept

WHAT ABOUT TESLA’S CYBERTRUCK?
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PL – Okay, that’s a very eclectic list of five cars indeed. Thank you. Actually, as we were going to interview you today, we asked Yanko Design’s over 1 million Instagram followers for questions, and one that came up several times was your take on the Tesla Cybertruck. When it came out – our demographic was a 50:50 breakdown. Half loved it because they said it was innovative and outside the box and the other half said it was rubbish. What do you think?

FF – My take? Okay, I think it’s brave and courageous. This truck is brave to go against convention but it’s nothing revolutionary and nothing new. I think Tesla has real guts to come out with something like that. It’s edgy and looks like a triangle or a pyramid shape but that is not new. You can find cars with sharp, triangular designs like the Aston Martin Bulldog or Citroen Karin concept, but at least they look good. I don’t see the Cybertruck as being innovative, just different. The electric powertrain technology inside is innovative, yes, but that’s what the market wants. To be honest, I think it’s bad to do something so aggressive in modern times. It’s like a caricature. In 99% of car designs, there is not a single straight line. Even when they look straight, every line is actually curved in some way. Even in the Fiat 130 and Maserati Boomerang, which is a beautiful wedge-shaped car, all of the lines are curved to a degree. But in the Tesla Cybertruck, some of its lines are actually straight. Also, the rear door area is not good because when you get in you will hit your head. They’ve made no consideration of the most basic consideration.

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WHY I CAME TO JAPAN 30 YEARS AGO
PL – Thanks for your expert insight into those designs. For someone who has traveled so much and worked in so many different design studios, I’d like to get an idea about the different aesthetics and approaches towards design.

FF – It comes back to the reason why I came to Japan over 30 years ago…
I was working on Japan designs for Mitsubishi in Italy in the 80s. In one of my first design jobs with Open Design in Torino where we were working on Mitsubishi’s Minica and GTO styling, I was seeing something totally different from the Japanese when compared to our traditional Italian designs. In the middle of the 80s was good in Italy. Sensibilities were so different. I was seeing some totally unique ways of doing designs from Japan. Just going through Japanese magazines like the well-known Car Graphic, I saw things that blew my mind. Like an advert for Bridgestone tires. I could not read the text but the images were telling. I saw a full page with a very nostalgic image of a seashore, of a man and a dog looking at them from behind, and then in the corner of the advert, was the name ‘Bridgestone’ and a small photo of a tire. If that was an ad for say, Pirelli tires in Italy, the tire would have featured much more prominently. I was intrigued with this artistic subtlety and very interested in this new design world opening up to me. Soon after I was invited to work in 1988 in Japan so I decided to go. I knew Italy, but I thought I needed more stimulation and a different outlook. I was attracted to things I don’t understand and I wanted to work outside of my comfort zone.

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THE LATE 80s IN JAPAN WAS LIKE WORKING IN DISNEYLAND
PL – The late 1980s? That was the peak of Japanese car design with the new launches like the Skyline GT-R, Mazda MX-5, Subaru Legacy, Toyota Celsior, and the opening of luxury brands Lexus and Infiniti in the U.S. These cars all influenced European car styling, production, and product planning in their own ways.

FF – That’s exactly right. It was the middle of the ‘Bubble Economy’ and the peak of Japanese design creativity. And there were so many concept cars coming out too. It was so alive and vibrant that for a designer like me, it felt like being in Disneyland! Remember the early 90s with those brilliant tiny cars like the Nissan Figaro, Suzuki Cappuccino, and Honda Beat? Japanese designers were certainly thinking outside of the box back then. They were willing to push the envelope and experiment.

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Image – Nissan Figaro

PL – So what really impressed you about Japan back then?

FF – It was part aesthetic and part philosophical. The aesthetics had a different range of criteria. Japanese design was similar to German or Italian design for the main, but there was always some kind of twist to it — either good or bad. But unexpected. In Europe, you have Italian, German, French, or English design — everything is defined. In Japan, they could mix everything without any barrier, without any frontier. And there were a lot of different influences from fashion, architecture as well. For example, the so-called ‘Pike’ postmodern cars from Nissan, namely the quirky Be-1, Pao, and Figaro.
In Europe, many saw those designs as copying European design. But not me. To me, they were bringing back the emotional and nostalgic feeling of old iconic cars such as the 2CV, Mini, and Fiat 500, but in truth, none of those Japanese cars were copies of anything. They resembled European cars in certain ways but they still had their own identity and uniqueness. They were taking some generic hints from Europe’s classic cars and reinventing them.

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Image – Hydrogen-powered H2 speed concept

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JAPANESE RETRO REACHES EUROPEAN ICONS
PL – Then again, you have a car like the Mazda MX-5, which was supposedly inspired by the Lotus Elan. But when the MX-5 was born in 1989, its looks, drivability, and reliability sparked a boom in roadsters giving birth to the Boxster, SLK, Z3, and TT among others.

FF – Yes, indeed. But what’s interesting is that Japan, through cars like the Be-1 and Figaro, was reinventing retro-style design. In the late 80s, Europeans were not into retro. But then, strangely, within around 15 years of these Japanese retro cars appearing, new versions of the Mini, Beetle, and Fiat 500 were launched. Because of the high intensity of creativity in Japan in the late 80s through the 90s, I realized that Japan was the right place to be at that time. That made me open up my mind to what was good and bad in Italian design and what was good and bad with Japanese design. The common denominators were purity, simplicity, and innovation although the definitions of those ideas were a little different in Japan. So it was those philosophies that I took with me to Pininfarina when I became their Design Director in 2011.

PL – Japan really seems to have shaped the designer you are today.

FF – Yes, you could say it did. But what really surprised and shocked me in the early 2000s was why Japan started to go in the wrong direction with a design that was not pure but very aggressive. They went through the 90s with the remnants of the bubble economy, but then from the late 90s, they seemed to get lost and were scared to do anything. They were turning things out without really knowing what to do. They just kept on doing what they were used to doing. Then they finally realized they had to change so Nissan brought on Carlos Ghosn while Toyota started with hybrids in earnest. That period you could say was a Japanese renaissance. Suddenly Lexus for example, wanted to become very original so it came up with the ‘Spindle’ design. Because they were saying that everyone buys Toyota but not for the design. So they tried to improve the design.

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DESIGN LOSES ITS DIRECTION
PL – Yes, as you say, in the 2000s, design became very edgy and aggressive, like the spindle grille.

FF – Many Japanese carmakers suddenly became extreme with design and went to the other end of the spectrum with edgy aggressive styling. It was like a caricature. Yes, design nuances like the spindle grille, surfaces twisting in every direction, lights which are a patchwork of different shapes. It was like they were saying ‘we want to be different and unique and any cost.’ But such a design is not beautiful. That change of heart really shocked the design community. Okay, to be honest, some Lexus surfaces are magnificently done. But there seems to be no real cohesion. It was like an orchestra with all of the musicians playing their own instrument as hard as they can, trying to get the most out of it, while not playing in unison with other musicians—so it just ends up being a cacophony. That is not music. Like Lexus designers, all of the players are incredibly talented, but the end result is not in symphony, so to speak. This comparison with an orchestra is something I feel more often in car design. They are great at playing their instruments but they don’t know how to create music.

PL – But even with those edgy design traits, Lexus still sold very well.

FF – Yes, the new styling, hi-tech, and luxury levels appealed to a younger generation because it was radical, and I think very Asian, seemingly influenced by Kabuki or Chinese opera. It was around that time that China started to copy those edgy designs. We cannot forget of course that around the early 2000s, BMW’s Chris Bangle was doing some strange stuff like that controversial 7 series rear end and others. Even today design at BMW is overdone like the 4 Series kidney grille for example.

PL – Yes, as you say, that grille is a little over the top perhaps. So where do you see design going in the future?

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CHINA AND INDIA GAIN INFLUENCE IN THE DESIGN STUDIO
FF – After 2000, design became repetitive and less creative and at the same time the digital world was happening. Now everyone everywhere can get online and be creative. It is getting more difficult to identify real trends from the original culture. Young designers today are being influenced from all over the internet including the digital worlds of China and India. As one-third of the world live in those two countries, now they are more influential than ever before.
At car design studios over the last 15 years, I’ve seen a lot of designers coming from India, China, Korea, and Russia. Suddenly there are more designers coming from these countries than traditional countries in Europe.

In China, there are several thousand design schools shooting out young potential designers every year. So today, even if you go to Western car companies, the majority of designers are either Indian, Chinese, Korean, or Russian which is having a definite influence on car design. Styling has changed already. For example, Russians are very precise, very technical but they have a particular taste for macho and aggressive design. Just look at the latest batch of SUVs coming out of Europe and the US. Some look very military-like. Then you have the Chinese who do these swoopy lines everywhere.

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Image – Pininfarina Sergio

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Image – H2 Speed concept

PL – I went to a couple of design studios last year and noticed the growing diversity of nationalities. As you say, many more Indians and Chinese. Speaking of the Chinese, they are becoming more influential on the world stage, not least because of their commitment to EVs. What sort of role do you think they will play in the near future?

FF – The big difference is that the Chinese are heavily into EVs and new technology and are able to switch and adapt quickly, whereas Americans, European and Japanese, like Toyota for example, are having trouble getting out of ICE (internal combustion) cars. China has already made this big jump into new tech and will help them gain a significant footing.
Remember that they started from basically nothing, so they can change fast.
The same thing happened with phones, like with Huawei. You did not know that name 10 years ago, and now it’s the biggest. I’ve been going to China for over 10 years and I have seen how quickly they can adapt and change.

PL – Speaking of design, how do you see design changing as powertrains switch to electric?

FF – Obviously with new EV powertrains we will see a totally new take on car design. I can understand, however, that people will still want a car looking like a traditional car. But in cities in the near future, we must think about personal transportation, which will require people to think in a different way. We don’t have to do the same shapes. You can make car bodies more efficient and practical. Indeed, you can make a car that can change its shape in the city, a car that adapts its shape to its needs or its environment. Cars will also be partially autonomous. You will be able to drive it on weekends but have it ferry you to work autonomously on weekdays.

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PL – Now, I’d like to ask you what you are up to now in Japan.

FF – For the past few years in Tokyo, I’ve been working as an independent car designer and design strategy adviser. I mostly now work on strategy and advanced design to define the positioning of a design or a brand. They include all the things that happen before you start to draw a design. My job is to tell a brand which is the best way to go forward for them. I firstly identify the value of the brand and then try to put it into perspective and then create guidelines before starting to develop it with a team of designers and strategists, who are located all over the world. Presently I am working with carmakers and other design companies but unfortunately, I cannot tell you what projects I’m working on now. (Smiles)

PL – Can you give us an idea of exactly what your work entails?

FF – I’m currently working with a German company to develop a new business on sustainable transportation. It’s related to trucks and buses with electric and hydrogen powertrains. They have the technology so they are doing retro-fitting on existing vehicles. And they have even started selling them now to public companies, with some new transport for cities like garbage trucks. I’m working to help them define their new brand and identity. You must first set up a vision and then develop the products based on that vision, followed by design direction and identity.

PL – Many thanks today. Finally, what advice do you have for young designers wanting to get into car design?

FF – I think designers need to move around in order to grow and adapt. Above all, don’t be afraid to work outside of your comfort zone. And always keep an open mind. Don’t be afraid of things you don’t understand. Put simply, a designer should be someone who enjoys the art of designing, is critical and complimentary of a peer’s work, puts things into perspective, changes, and adapts.

PL – Grazie Mille.

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