Recently I received by email a new small mini portfolio in Pdf format from a young design student asking me for some tips and advices. As usually I do I went through it with attention, it was made of 17 pages with sketches and color rendered illustrations of final chosen designs. At a first glance [...]

Constantly questioning what already exists and searching for new, even more innovative solutions: this is the principle behind “Vorsprung durch Technik” – in the design area, too. In an interview, Gary Telaak from Audi Exterior Design and Ulrich Beierlein from Audi Interior Design explain the motives that inspired them when working on the new Audi [...]

The work that goes into building a physical model of a concept car is usually hidden behind closed doors, known only to engineers sworn to secrecy and similarly tight-lipped subcontractors. Ask anyone involved exactly which companies use 3-D printing technology to create concepts and the answer will invariably be, “many of them.” One company, however, [...]

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but if you look at a stranger, the first thing you see is a face. And like it or not, people form opinions based on that first glance. So it is the same with cars, though there is a critical difference. People can’t do much [...]

Peugeot wasn’t always a carmaker. The company’s manufacturing roots are mechanical, but only kicked into mass production with their innovative range of pepper mills and coffee pots in the mid 19th century. Within a few decades, the Peugeot family had branched out into bicycles and the company joined the automotive revolution (just like many other [...]

Automotive designers spend years coming up with the look for each new model. They style every inch of the car and have to consider not only modern trends but also the heritage of the brand. Many chief designers also try to come up with a common theme for the many models produced by a single [...]

Several times I wrote about the importance of sketching cars correctly and the image here published made by designer Akos Szas is an example. The car sketches composition about a VW project proposals shows how exciting could be drawing cars. I imagine that Akos’s drawing is part of a larger series of presented works, what [...]

Jason White, a contract car designer at Ford and an instructor in the Transportation Design department at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, must be a wonderful teacher. His first book, the self-published and obliquely titled “Old School Viscom: 20 Renderings in 20 Steps”, is fascinating from the first page to anyone who has ever wanted [...]

McLaren, the Formula One racing group that is attempting to flex its muscles in road cars, vows to build machines that will leave the likes of Ferrari, Porsche and Aston Martin in the dust. And this requires the company to move faster than its rivals to adopt the latest advancements in computer graphics technology for [...]

Team ZigWheels was in Japan recently to unravel the philosophy behind the design language of one of the world’s most successful car companies – Honda. Muntaser Mirkar came back both impressed and enlightened

Growing up in Detroit during the muscle car years as a daughter of a Chrysler executive, Kay Grubola can remember attending a party at the house of her father’s boss. What made the event so memorable were the drawings on the walls, striking colorful works by automobile designers dreaming up the cars of the future. [...]

June 17, 2003 – This year’s Eyes on Design Automotive Design Exhibit will present 75 years of GM Design at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan on June 22. The event will open with a brunch presentation by Wayne Cherry, GMs fifth head of design. Car Design News expects that the name of [...]

Roberto Giolito, Fiat’s head of design, was at the Los Angeles auto show two weeks ago, mostly to show off the new Fiat 500, Americanized with tougher bumpers, softer ride — and cup holders.

1. WALTER DE’SILVA (59, Italian) – Head of design, Volkswagen Group Key cars: Audi R8 and A5, 2009 VW Scirocco and 2012 Jetta While other big design chiefs have been shedding brands (Ed Welburn at General Motors and J Mays at Ford), de’Silva — as the top designer at the acquisitive VW Group — has [...]

How forward-thinking design and functionality came together to make a remarkable car. Probably the greatest challenge facing automotive designers these days are matching the many safety and other demands within a given vehicle with something that is both aesthetically pleasing and fun to drive – not an easy task. Can one design a car that [...]

This paper presents two geometric operations–constrained curve beautification and polygonal mesh scissoring–for a sketch-based Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tool for the configuration design of automobile instrument panels. Using the proposed sketch- based CAD, industrial designers and mechanical engineers can work together closely to perform the early-stage configuration design efficiently by drawing candidate sub- panel boundaries on [...]

Conceptual design in the automotive industry is a time-consuming process. Iterations between concept sketches, created with traditional two dimensional methods, and 3D digital representations of a prototype are currently one of the big bottlenecks. In this paper we present a framework for an integrated 2D-3D design environment. The core of the framework is a model [...]

Although a great part of the new-product development process in automotive industry is already digitalized to some degree, the level of digitalization of the styling process is not so high particularly in view of concurrent engineering. This paper is (1) to investigate the state-of-the-art of computer-aided styling (CAS), (2) to propose desirable CAS guidelines reflecting [...]