It’s been over 5 years, but it’s time to say “Good Bye”.

Our time at CDF has been incredible, but the busy lifestyles we lead as husbands, fathers, and designers has us re-prioritizing… in a good way.

Please keep up to date with us, as we always have new projects going.

Dali: http://www.twitter.com/kewlrats

Dustin: http://www.twitter.com/shedski

Jason: http://www.oldschoolviscom.com

Arvind: http://www.twitter.com/drivenmavens

Good Bye!

Our friends over at AutoLine have Ford’s Joel Piaskowski, head of Design, on their After Hours show tonight.

Autoline’s John McElroy will be joined by Piaskowski, Autoextremist Peter De Lorenzo, as well as Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press.

Need we say more?
Autoline After Hours

Pop-out Chat Window

Got questions for Rapid Fire? Put “AAH Question” in the subject line and e-mail it to viewermail@autolinedetroit.tv

Or, leave them a message by calling 1-620-288-6546 or by clicking below!

Friend of CarDesignFetish, Dwayne Vance, is running a Kickstarter campaign to get is latest book published. Dwayne’s hoping to have The Hot Rod Art Book: Volume 2 out this Summer, and to do so he has a goal of raising just $5000 more by May 28th.

The book is a collection of work from concept artists and designers all taking a crack at creating some incredible hot rods. A look at a few of the images has classic and modern hot rods, hot rods battling robots, and even motorcycles and graphic designs. Some SERIOUSLY cool stuff!

Dwayne has several levels of pledges, including getting a copy of the book, t-shirts, personalized artwork and more. Have a look, and pass the word along!

The Hot Rod Art book: Masters of Chicken Scratch Vol 2

Our sister site, SideQuesting.com, is hosting a great Light Cycle design contest!  Sketch a cool light cycle!  Go on over there and enter for your chance to win some cool prizes!

Official Link to Contest

CarDesignFetish knows that you like cool cars.  We also know that you like to sketch cool cars.  What happens when you put the two together?  A really cool design contest, that’s what!

We’re hosting our first ever sketch contest on CDF, and it centers around a classic vehicle: the Batmobile.  Gotham’s masked detective has one of most iconic rides around, filled with gadgets, weapons, and style.  The goal is for you to create/sketch a Batmobile concept, but to do so in 2 hours or less and send them over to us.  Pencil sketches, Photoshop, Painter… whatever you want to use to create it is up to you.  We just want to see a great idea (or two).

The focus is to be creative, but not over-render an image.  Just an hour or two will suffice to get a cool sketch or rendering out there.

CONTEST

We’ll feature each concept on our site and select a winner.  The winner will get copies of pivotal Batman graphic novels Cacophany penned by Kevin Smith and Year One by Frank Miller.  The contest begins TODAY, March 4th, and lasts until Monday, March 14th.  We’re lucky to have Dwayne Vance be a guest judge, as well as Team CDF, as we select the best from the bunch.  Submit as many as you’d like (per the rules below).

Each entry will be evaluated on merits of cool design and sketching basics, so perspective and proportion will be important.  Will it be a classic 60′s Batmobile, a newer Tumbler-style?  Will you take a crack at Tim Burton’s Batmobile, or something completely different?

Good Luck, and have fun!

RULES

Contest starts Today, Friday, March 4th.
Submissions due by Sunday night, March 13th, at 11:59PM EST
Winner announced on Tuesday, March 15th
Format: 11″x17″ JPEG, PNG, TIFF file
Submit as often as you’d like, as there is no limit.
Send sketches to: cardesignfetish@gmail.com
Open internationally, but prize will be awarded to US residents only (for shipping reasons).
All qualifying submissions will be posted in a gallery.
CDF reserves the right to disqualify entrees.

[The contest has no affiliation with DC Comics or Warner Brothers. The Batman and Botmobile properties are copyright and trademarked by DC.  Images courtesy DC/Warner Bros. Concepts and images submitted are owned by the artists.]

[Source: Autoblog]

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]

The iPad is an incredibly versatile tool.  For Designers, it can become essential, though sifting through the ocean of apps may be daunting.  As many a Designer received an iPad this holiday season, I felt it apt time to compile a list of apps (and tools) to turn the iPad into the perfect portable Industrial Design, with an exhaustive software suite and few extras thrown in for fun.

Load up iTunes, get the gift cards ready, and begin downloading… NOW.

Accessories

Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Stylus

Out of all accessories, this is the most essential.  We need a stylus to sketch, and Ten One’s Pogo line is the best of the bunch, providing a comfortable feel and a being nearly lag-free.  Must buy! ($8)

Alternatives: Ten One’s Pogo Stylus (smaller size)

Apple’s iPad Case ($40)

It’s not perfect, but it’s still the best one available at a decent price.  Protect your iPad, because you WILL drop it.

Alternatives: Incase Convertible Magazine Jacket, Quirky Cloak

Sketching

Sketchbook Pro ($3/Holiday Sale)

As we noted earlier this year, this is not only the best sketching/rendering/art app on the iPad, but it’s actually one of the best sketching tools PERIOD.  Multiple layers, endless brushes, customization, import/export options… the list goes on and on.  Everyone, even non-designers, should own this app.

Alternatives: ArtStudio, Layers Pro, Adobe Ideas, Brushes

Vector Imaging

iDraw ($8.99)

This extremely versatile vector-based illustration program surprised me.  Not only can I create vector-based concepts and designs, but I was able to import images and add text, resulting in a great presentation/layout-creation tool.  The pieces can be exported in a variety of formats, from vector-based PDF to PNG.

Alternative: Freeform

Image Manipulation

Photogene ($3.99)

Often, we’ll need to take a sketch or photograph and modify it in preparation for further usage.  This can include functions from simple rotation and cropping all the way to color adjustment and retouching.  Photogene is as complete as they get for the iPad, providing several filters on top of the already extensive manipulation services.

Alternatives: Adobe Photoshop Express, PhotoPad

Note-Taking

Sound Note ($4.99)

Taking notes during meetings can be an arduous task, albeit an important one.  With the iPad, note-taking apps are plentiful.  Sound Note provides not only some basic hand-writing recognition and keyboard note-taking, but sketching and synced audio recording.  After a meeting is over, simply tap the written note and the recorded audio plays from the timestamp when the note/text was written.  Incredibly useful!

Alternatives: Audio Note, Penultimate

Project & Task Management

SG Project ($9.99)

Project management tools are necessary to make sure that our work is being done on time, and that we are receiving the support we need. SG Project allows for timeline management, multiple workflows, multiple employees, and more.  It’s basically a portable version of Microsoft Project.

Alternatives: Nozbe Todo

Presentation

Keynote ($9.99)

It’s important to showcase our work, and Powerpoint-style programs are an easy way to create detailed presentations of our projects.  For the iPad, Apple’s own Keynote is the best of the bunch, with animation, image addition, a plethora of themes, and the ability to import PPT files rounding it out.

CAD Viewers

on-Hand Viewer XL ($1.99)

Though there are not any deep CAD manipulation tools available for the iPad yet, there are a few excellent viewers.  on-Hand Viewer XL provides the ability to load a CAD model (CATIA, IGS, STL, etc) in its native format for viewing and markup.  Rotate, zoom, cu sections and grab images for quick notes and sharing.

Alternatives: iRhino 3D, AutoCad WS, vueCAD,

File-Sharing

DropBox (Free)

DropBox is the quintessential method for sharing large files with teams and clients.  The free iPad app allows for uploading of images and files to the cloud for access at any time.  Create a secure folder and manage what your clients can and can’t access.

Alternatives: FTP One the Go Pro, AirSharing HD

Meetings

WebEx (Free)

Hosting and attending virtual meetings is no longer a future prospect.  With portable devices, it can be nearly impossible to miss a meeting.  WebEx has been one of the premiere online meeting apps for years, and since it has made its way onto the iPad it has revolutionized meetings on the go.  From VOIP to screen-sharing, notation, and video, the app has it all.

Alternatives: GoTo Meeting, Fuze Meeting

If you have are using any apps for the iPad that are worthwhile to Designers, let us know in the comments!