Due to the summer being a typically lackluster time of year for new vehicle releases (unless you’re Chevrolet) design studios tend to branch out and, err, TRY a few things.  It is this time of year that we see all manner of products come from these studios, usually as a Design House in collaboration with some other product entity.

We’ve seen LaCie’s Porsche-designed hard drives, watches from Ducati, bobsleds from Lotus, and even foosball tables from Audi.  While this has been a regular part of the design world for decades, we are seeing the current crop become all the more “in our faces” as the automotive market remains in a lull and the studios look to work outside of the auto industry.

Which brings about a great question:  When is it too much?  Or, is it EVER too much?  Should auto industry studios be MORE involved in the rest of the design world, spreading their talents into areas where Design is sorely missed?

Let us know in the comments, and click the link for more images.

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It’s not often we dive into the world of the ridiculously rich and famous, as our Design instincts regularly tell us that great design doesn’t typically float in their oceans of gaudiness.  However, to further along my inability to tell a story with very, very bad boating-related puns have a look at the latest creation from Philippe Starck: the Motor Yacht A, designed for Russian uber-billionaire Andrey Melnichenko and his uber-hot wife Aleksandra.

Melnichenko, the bad boy of Russian wealth (aren’t they all?) commissioned Starck to create this epic yacht design, throwing away the typical rules of boats of the redonkulously rich in favor of a vessel that can scare the bejeezus out of paddle-boats in its way.  Opting for a sleak, streamlined design, with a more enclosed body (read: none of the crazy amounts of open decks), we can only imagine that Starck’s vision was for a menace on the ocean, able to conjure up images of Battlecruisers and war boats of the 40s.

Leave it up to us Designers to throw a monkey wrench into yet another industry, and leave it up to Russian billionaires to use that wrench in excess.

More photos after the break. Images courtesy YachtSpotter.com and SuperYachtTimes.com.

(Thanks, Sean!)

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“And here we…..GO!” With the Dark Knight movie exploding into theaters July 18, there is plenty buzz about how incredible this movie really is! The latest for the Caped Crusader throws him under the deranged claws of the maniacal, homicidal, psychopathic killer known as the JOKER!

I remember watching the campy 60’s movie starring Adam West and Burt Ward in “Batman” with my older brother for the first time. I was probably around 7 or 8. We would “surf” through the channels, all 13 of them, ripping through that sundial shaped channel knob on our state of the art Zenith TV. Suddenly!!! An out of shape middle aged man in tights and blue satin, dawning the prominent symbol of the bat, along with his panty hose wearing boy wonder side kick, Robin, were climbing the side of a fake Styrofoam brick building. My brother and I looked at each other in complete shock and awe, not because Batman had forgotten to take few laps around the track, but because we could not believe we were watching an actual Batman movie!! We had read the comic books, purchased the action figures, but never saw him in real life!! That was the coolest thing!
Ahhhh….those were the days. How things have evolved and progressed….or in some cases…digressed if looking at director Joel Schumacher’s movies. Recently resurrected from the grave in 2005 with the successful Batman Begins, the Batman Franchise has undergone numerous transformations through the years starting with the campy 60’s series (not to forget the early series in the 40’s as well) starring Adam West and Burt Ward in Batman. Twenty three years later, the world was given a true visual treat with Tim Burton’s perspective on a serious, dark, and gothic rendition of the Batman in 1989.

No matter how campy, serious, or ridiculous the script was; the creators and designers for the vehicles and props were always dedicated to providing the audience with the best they had to offer. Each batmobile had evolved to bring to the audience something new and exciting. Let’s take a look at these films.
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Ferrari recently made it known that it was looking into the possibility of one-off vehicles… if the buyer had a mountain of cash, some design “ideas”, and THE NERVE to even try.

Well, Yanko Design decided to have a little fun with the notion, posting up a few concepts that would make any Ferrari enthusiast spin headfirst into oncoming traffic.

[All images courtesy Yanko Design]

Click on the link to see their images of the ultimate “Homer Car”. (Some of them are actually pretty interesting.)

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Is car design broken?  Jalopnik posted an interesting article/question today about something that many consumers and media outlets are starting to key into, and that is the notion that automotive design has, in the last few years, not been all that it could be.

Is it marketing?  Upper management?  Inexperienced designers?  Overkill?  Or just the current design & styling trends?

Or is auto design fine and dandy, and just a few bad cars are ruining it for the rest of us?

Read the Jalopnik article and let us know what you think!

… is NOT of a car.  In fact, it’s of an HD video camera.  RED’s Scarlet 3K camera is an amazingly small prosumer HD camera.  So small, that it can be used with one hand to wow your relatives while you throw bean bags into a wooden board at your family reunion this summer.

What makes the sketch so hot?  Well, the fact that it is extremely graphic (probably made in Illustrator) and nearly perfectly lighted, and that the camera design is actually pretty cool isn’t a negative either.

Wanna see it?  Check it out after the break.

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For a Mercedes, this is a pretty sweet looking car that speaks more to the “I am an enthusiast crowd” rather than the “old and crusty crowd.”  Now is it still good looking with a price of $300 g’s?  As Borat would say, Not so much.  If I am spending that much money, I want a car that is unforgettable on the road, aka Lambo and Ferrari.

I always appreciate a wide body kit and this one looks decent.  The rear could be sculpted into the body side better.  The combination of crisp intersection into soft gooey light catcher is a little rough.  I would like to see the rear view showing the hard top roof and wing.

With only 200 coming to the states you will probably never see one, but kudos for Mercedes to come out with such a car and actually sell it.

For more info check out this article via Autoweek after the jump.
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The Big 4: General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and… everyone else?  Over the last 10 years there has been an incredible amount of new American car companies being born, each taking aim at capitalizing on the niche growing market of alternative fuel vehicles.  Although they currently cannot compare to the sheer size and sales of the OEMs, they respectfully comprise their own market and combined can be considered a 4th entry into the league of American car companies.  They are the ‘Wii” to the Big 3’s XBox 360 & PS3: filling a demand that the consumer did not know they needed.  It mimics the booms of the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

With this boom also comes the growing pains of finding the right design aesthetic to help define this new market.  Does it remain traditional?  Do all vehicles need to be either micro-cars or roadsters?  Swoopy shapes or edgy?  Futuristic or modern?

This is where you come in.  In the comments, let us know what you think about the aesthetic design direction for these new vehicles. We’ll incorporate the comments into a future podcast.

Looking for inspiration on what to comment on?  After the jump we’ve posted images of vehicles from several US-based companies.

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I was on a road trip the past couple days and passed an old late eighties Ford Ranger.  This was a sweet truck when I was a young teen watching Bigfoot.  One of the things I noticed was the use of OEM graphics covering the entire body side.  I thought boy, you don’t see that anymore.  Vehicles of the eighties were pretty boring when it came to the form of the car.  So I guess some of the excitement was made up with graphics (decals) to add interest to the body side or hood.  (Click on the picture to see all of the different Ranger graphics through out the years)

Automotive graphics or stickers have kind of been absent for the past decade or two.  Although the onslaught of muscle cars have definitely brought back the “stickers” from the seventies. Cars today are typically defined by clean forms.  Even the tuner crowd which made decals popular again have diminished to “sleeper” cars.  Why would you want to call out to the cops, “here I am!”

Like all fads, could this be coming back in style? Read more