We’re super excited by this new book from designers Matt Morocco and Adam Hubers, recent CCS graduates and full-time product and automotive designers. Youth energy is awesome, and these dudes are harnessing it to the fullest, taking a pet project and placing it on Kickstarter. And you know what? They’ve already blown past their initial monetary goal, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up and supporting the duo.

The book is the kind that every designer has been waiting for, professional or student. It teaches the absolute necessary basics for car design. Literally, it WILL make you a better car designer — nothing beats the basics, after all. From perspective and looseness to tight sketches, the book gets it all jammed in there.

Stop what you’re doing, support these guys, and get the book here on Kickstarter.

What would a possible next-generation Pontiac Solstice look like?  Well, had the company stuck around, Macedonian designer Dejan Hristov’s aggressive version might be ready for show rooms.  Hristov created a sexy convertible that would look great not only as a concept car, but maybe even in the latest Transformers flick.

Hristov melded sculptural form language with Pontiac heritage, updating the now famous “nostrils” of the brand but maintaining the proportions that it is known for.  If the last Solstice was a little too soft or curvacious for your tastes, then this update might be manly enough for you.

You can follow Hristov at his DeviantArt page at: http://dejanhristov.deviantart.com

Thanks, Dejan!

Superstar Designer/Artist (and friend of CDF) Dwayne Vance is hosting an online class for rendering vehicles in Photoshop and Painter.  This Thursday, March 3rd at 2PM EST (11PST) Dwayne will be hosting a session talking to the basics of setting up a sketch in perspective, using design language to set up a theme, making and utilizing textures, and creating a visual flow for the viewer.  The session lasts for about 1.5 hours, and will be a TERRIFIC way for people both new to automotive design AND professionals to pick up and learn new techniques at improving our vehicle renderings.  There will also be a question/answer session that follows.

The webinar takes place as a part of the Digital Art Summit and can be found here: CLICK FOR LINK

This is a MUST SEE for all those interested in vehicle design, as we can attest to Dwayne’s awesome abilities and techniques first-hand.

The webinar cost just $47 and will be well worth it.  It will also be available afterward for purchase and download.

For a little more on Dwayne, read the press release below.  We’ll be there on Thursday, and we hope you will as well!

Design and Render Vehicles

Some quick basics to getting set up to use Painter. 10min

1.Set up a quick drawing pallet for yourself. Some basic Perspective Principles.
2. Creating wheels for your vehicle. How to make your wheels in the correct perspective using the major and minor axis principle. 10 min
3. Using wheels as your proportioning scale. Using a side view to measure out your 3/4 perspective view. 5 min
4. Draw car using Painter and talk about different design languages. How to use those design languages to create you final design. 15 min
5. Make textures by using markers, pencils, paint strokes, 5min
6. Talk about rendering process using Photoshop. Talk about reflections and different surface treatments on vehicles. Man made surface vs natural surfaces. How to use different rendering techniques in Photoshop and Painter. Render vehicle drawing. Using vignette techniques to make eye flow through the design. 25 min
7. Using textures to add further interest to your vehicles and design. 5 min

Question and answer time. 15min

About Dwayne:

Dwayne graduated from Art Center College of Design with a BS Degree in Transportation Design. He began his design career with Troy Lee Designs in Corona, California, as a designer of high-end motocross protective gear. Dwayne then became a Senior Designer for Mattel, Hot Wheels division. While at Hot Wheels he designed and developed several cars and led teams for entire toy lines. He eventually returned to Troy Lee Designs where he continued to design cutting-edge motocross gear including the SE2 helmet and other protective equipment.

Dwayne now has his own company, “Future Elements – High energy art and design-” they do work for companies such as Mattel’s Hot Wheels, Batman and entertainment divisions, Hasbro’s Transformers and Star Wars division, Texaco, Oakley, Warner Bros, Mazda, Chumba racing, Upper Deck, Blackstar Paintball, Arctic Cat snowmobiles, Corel Painter, Jada toys, Fly Racing, Troy Lee Designs, Flying Lizard Racing, EA Games, Activision, DC Comics and a few others.

Dwayne’s designs have been widely published in magazines and books including “How to draw Hot Wheels the Hot Wheels Way” and “35 years of Hot Wheels”, Official Corel Painter magazine, Imagine FX, Car Culture Deluxe, 2d Artist magazine, Digital Painting Techniques and Secrets of Corel Painter Experts.

He self published a book along with 12 other hot rod artist called “The Hot Rod Art Book: Masters of chicken Scratch” and now The Hot Rod Art Book: Masters of Chicken Scratch Vol 2. Dwyane’s art work is featured at the Peterson Automobile Museum in Los Angeles, California. He has a series of  prints and artwork based on Hot Rod and Muscle car art that are created in mixed media’s.

You can find the artwork for sale on www.mastersofchickenscratch.com

Cars that share the general traits of a baby’s face trigger the ‘Isn’t it cute’ response in consumers.

The Fiat 500 is the latest in a long line of “cute cars.”  So what is it about cars that make them cute?  Mostly proportions control the feeling of a car.  Most cute cars are compact cars that are a little taller than wider with softer graphic forms.  The VW Beetle and Mini are other great examples of cute cars.  If you are a people / car watcher then check out the guys that drive these vehicles.  I bet the color of the car is darker, the rims a little bigger, the sills a bit lower.  All of these attributes help disguise the cuteness and catch you off guard.  I fall victim to this driving a VW GTI.  I don’t think a GTI is a cute car but a base level Golf is a cute car to me.  It is an interesting phenomena and as more cars get smaller you we see more attempts at the costumes to through off the cuteness.  Who said cute cars are bad anyway?

Check out the article after the jump which talks about the psychology of car features and how they play tricks on us.

Linda Miesler and Helmut Leder decided to put evolutionary theory to the test in the product design world. At the 7th International Design and Emotion Conference in Chicago, Miesler, a doctoral student, presented the lessons that she and Leder, a psychology professor, learned about baby faces and responses to designed objects.

There’s a body of research indicating that humans think human baby faces are cute and respond positively to them — this is where the evolutionary theory comes in. It’s good for us to respond positively to our young. Baby faces share certain attributes — relatively large eyes, and smallish noses and mouths, for example. Humans smile at and have positive emotional reactions to objects they feel are cute.

Another whole set of studies has shown that humans perceive the front end of a car as a human face. The headlights are eyes, the grill a nose, and the air intake a mouth. We infer attributes for the car, such as gender, based on the face that we see.

Miesler and Leder, as detailed in their paper “The Cute Look: Baby-Schema Effects in Product Design,” had people look at images of cars that had been altered so that their “faces” were more baby-like and also the original head-on photos of the same cars. In the modified images, the headlights had been made 20 percent larger, the grill 20 percent smaller and the air intake 20 percent narrower but 20 percent higher — babies lips are not as wide laterally as an adults, but fuller. Some of the cars involved were compact and some were mid-size. Cross-sections of the compact cars were rounder than the larger cars, which also has a potential cuteness ramification — comfortably padded babies rank higher on the cuteness meter than scrawny ones.

The altered images of the cars were seen as cuter than the altered ones, and compact cars were cuter than midsized ones.

Although not everyone wants a cute car, at least some car shoppers do, and designers now have some empirical support for making certain models look at us with baby faces. Not all brands are congruent with cuteness. Somehow, a Hummer with a baby face doesn’t seem like a very good idea — better to apply these findings to cell phones than vehicles designed by the Defense Department.

[article courtesy of Miller-McCune]

The video above is of The Daily, the new iPad/tablet magazine app from News Corp.  Why are we posting about a digital magazine on a car design blog?  Hearken back to this video from IDEO that we posted back in September on their vision of the future of the book.  In short, it’s a more personalized, yet wildly social experience.

Flash forward to this week in which News Corp and Apple unveiled their own vision of the future of digital reading.  In this case, news topics take center stage, and yet the content is again more social yet personalized.  The Daily allows for news to be delivered throughout the day to the iPad.  The articles are divided into pages, like the Wired app and many web pages before it, with interactive elements, videos, and feedback.

Where The Daily pushes the medium is in its personalization and ability to actively engage in the conversation.  Sports scores and news are relative to the user’s preferences, time-wasting games like Sudoku and Crosswords are scored and kept alive on Gamecenter leaderboards, articles can be read or viewed through summary videos, and news can be shared with friends through Twitter or Facebook, with a live stream of comments.

Add in an intuitive multi-touch mechanic and a beautiful presentation, and the evolution of IDEO’s vision is apparent.

So again, why does appear on a car design website?  Considering how companies like Apple and Google influence technology within vehicles, with an app like The Daily becoming a personalizable news source, so too will the automotive user experience.  This is a clear vision of the future of how we consume content, react to it, and spit it back out.  Where we once listened to the radio for our news, we will eventually be interacting and replying to it through audio and video, through our cars reporting live weather and traffic conditions, and through our own experiences.  This is the consumable user interface that will (eventually) become a part of our every day experiences.

The Daily is available now for free in the iTunes App Store for the iPad, and will carry a $.99 weekly fee beginning in two weeks.

Chip Foose manages to get into everything it seems.  He is a true designer being able to use his talents wherever requested while pulling off great work.  Check out his latest endeavor with Oakley.  With shoes and watches being, dare I say every designers fetish, Foose can knock this one off his list.  I appreciate the fact that he always includes artwork in his projects.  Maybe not here in his actual shoes but the packaging is exploding with a composition of shoe sketches inter mingled with of course a hot rod and palm trees.

Hit the jump for more images….

[pics courtesty of notcot]

This year at NAIAS, Chevrolet officially took the wraps off of the new Aveo Sonic.  (Yes, we know: we still don’t like the name either.)

The redesign of GM’s key subcompact was a lengthy process, and the Bowtie has been kind enough to post a video interview with John Mack, Design Director, and Allen Kim, Lead Designer, about what drove the direction for the vehicle.  From its motorcycle-influenced cluster to the jet-turbine vents, the Designers speak about several of the key decision points.

It’s only about two minutes long, but should provide a good idea as to some of what made the new vehicle a 180-degree turn from the previous generation Aveo.

In a previous installment, we chronicled the ups and downs of the Djet, one of Matra’s forays into the small sports car market.  This is the Djet’s successor, the 530.

By 1965, Matra’s CEO wanted to produce a sports car that would be more accessible to the buying public; a voiture des copains, or car for friends.  So he tapped former Simca designer Philippe Guédon to create the 530 (Guédon had previously made modifications to the Djet).   The new car would employ a steel frame fitted with a polyester body.  Power would come from a mid-mounted Ford Taunus V4.  And unlike the Djet, the 530 would sport a targa roof and pop-up headlights — both progressive features for the time (“Matra 530″).

Stylistically, the resulting theme is quite attractive.  It’s slim, with a sort of bird-in-space movement in the bodyside — punctuated suddenly by a dramatic haunch over the rear wheel.  The wheels, for their part, are unusually small, but I don’t mind.  Proportionally, it all seems to work.  After all, this is a far more relaxed car than the Djet.  It’s the kind of sports car you would take on a leisurely drive through the country rather than compete with at the track.  And like many French cars, it’s an excellent canvas for artists.  This example, painted by Sonia Delaunay, makes an almost deconstructivist counterpoint to the base car’s shapely figure.

“Matra 530.”  Wikipedia. 11 Jul 2010.  Web.  9 Jan 2011.

Friend of CarDesignFetish Mike Smith (Hi, Mike!) was recently featured in Autodesk’s “Sketch Your Way to Success” promotional series.  In the piece, Mike, an automotive designer for over 10 years, reveals what drives his work in the design field, where his inspiration comes from (hint: flying and racing bikes), and how digital tools have become an essential part of a Designer’s work. The video showcases some of his terrific sketches, renderings, and his process.

As someone who went to school with and was influenced by Mike, I can attest to his incredible skills as a Designer.  This is a great video, not to miss.

Also, be sure to check out the rest of Autodesks’s series here: Sketch Your Way to Success (YouTube)

[via Core77]

Reminder:  There’s still time to order your 2011 Rendered Hope charity car design calendar before it is no longer available.  Order now, and help make this a great holiday season for some great kids who deserve it!

ORDER HERE