Behind the scenes: The designers that make cars cool

Imagine dreaming about cars — and getting paid to do so. Then imagine what it would be like to create the cars of the future. That’s what car designers do everyday.

Automotive design is much more than the simple skill of sketching out a car outline. Car design is part creativity and part mad science. The formal practice dates back to the late 1920s at General Motors, when Harley Earl became the first executive to lead a department dedicated to the design of the automobile. To this day, the design department at every major automaker is tasked to make people fall in love with the way their cars look and feel.

Dreaming for a Living: How to Prep for a Career in Car Design

The ability to dream about cars and the surrounding culture is an actual job requirement, to anticipate what’s around the corner, and plot what it looks like to get there. How will people use their vehicles in five or ten years? Where will they go? What will they want their cars to feel, smell, sound, and look like? Design touches on all the senses; it’s the definition of user experience.

Secrecy is of the utmost importance. Designers must keep their vision under wraps. Visiting a carmaker’s design studio requires extensive security clearance. Patience is part of the design process, because it takes years for the work to come to fruition. By the time a vehicle launches to the media, car designers have already moved into the next era. The hush-hush nature of the studio’s forward thinking activity adds an element of intrigue to the process, and why these jobs are some of the most coveted in the industry.

Several universities teach car design as a discipline, including top programs at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California and the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. The programs are competitive to earn a position, but are the way to fast track into a company.

In some ways the fundamental skill of a car designer remains the same as it has for decades -- it all comes down to vision. “For starters, incredible observation skills are critical,” says Ralph Gilles, head of design for FCA, in an interview.

Gilles oversees a team of international designers that work on dozens of nameplates that range from the elegant Alfa Romeo Giulia and the Maserati MC20, to the practical Chrysler minivan, to the rowdy Jeep Wrangler, and the brash Dodge Demon muscle car.

“Passion, drive and the willingness to learn are some of the qualities that we look for in our team members,” Gilles says. “The basic skill set can only get you so far, you have to want to continue to grow, work well in a team dynamic, take constructive criticism in stride and have a passion and love for what you’re doing. That’s what sets designers apart from each other,”

Key Steps in the Car Design Process

Designing a car takes years. The automotive design process starts with an idea and a brief before any line is drawn or coded. From two dimensional images the work moves into three dimensional clay models. As the scale of the build increases, new elements are added that must take into account aerodynamics, material, weight, and fluctuating proportions. Revisions are a constant, and collaboration is necessary among hundreds of exterior designers, interior designers, stylers, and clay modelers to bring cars to life, sometimes several years later.

If the car is a concept, its purpose is to spark the imagination of the public, and is brought to fruition more quickly. If the vehicle is headed for real world production, the designer’s tweaks become more purposeful. Engineering, marketing, and product planning inform every element of the work, and can alter the course of the form. The team’s ability to communicate, collaborate, and innovate is what makes it all come together.

But what is changing is the nature of cars themselves, particularly inside the car, where people spend the majority of their time. Electric vehicles, autonomous capabilities and the connected car mean that car designers lead the driver experience. “Today, a designer is almost like an anthropologist as we seek to set trends, re-direct popular culture and hopefully, create iconic products along the way,” FCA design chief Ralph Gilles says.

A painstaking obsession with detail is an essential skill to work in a design studio. For interior designers that might mean dozens of tries in order to get the shape of a knob, a handle, or a button just right. On the exterior it may come down to a tiny curvature of a surface. Across the board, a designer has the ability to see how the form and function of lines and surfaces coalesce.

And all of that process requires adapting to new tools of the industry, such as intuitive software, XR, VR and AR, which enhance the speed and efficiency of the process. Cars are designed for the global customer and must adhere to a set of complicated regulations and safety standards that vary from country to country. The designers have to work around the rules and still find a way to make the vehicles unique. A good car design program will have faculty on board from the field who are attuned to the newest innovations.

The Essential Skills It Takes to Design cars

“It’s important to have ongoing discussions with managers, team members and outside departments to understand the overall goals, objectives and mission of what you are creating,” Stellantis design chief Ralph Gilles says, who is responsible for Jeep, Dodge, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Chrysler designs. “These discussions also help to give designers perspective and understanding to ensure they’re creating deeply inclusive products their customers desire and one that is a response to a question they hadn't even thought to ask.”

Each team must communicate with meticulous accuracy in order for the car to come together. What stands out about any car is the pieces designers get wrong. When something is not executed well, the customers will notice.

“It’s problem solving,” says Sue Magnusson, who is head of Colors, Materials, and Finish for Lucid Motors, a new car company preparing to launch its first vehicle. “It’s being open. It’s being flexible. It’s being able to communicate very complex technologies and being able to get on board with our suppliers about the science of things.”

Magnusson, like many designers showed an early interest in architecture and interior design, but also is a self-described car enthusiast. Her neighbor’s Porsche 911 piqued her interest in cars when she was a kid. The classic 911 has wooed many into the profession – an example of design that’s become timeless, relevant, and still exudes the intoxicating spirit of an iconic sports car. (Gilles references the 911 as one of his early inspirations, as well.) “I have a total love for Porsches now,” Magnusson says.”I’ve always been sort of a car girl. You always have this passion for cars.”

For her specialty in materials, the environment of the car is everything. “The discipline is very deep,” she says. Magnusson first landed in an automotive design role at DesignWorks, an industrial design company that was purchased by BMW. At the time, color and trim was beginning to emerge as a key part of the design process, and she was fascinated by the field.

Magnusson went on to work as a senior CMF designer for both Volkswagen and Audi. She had a hand in the VW Beetle, the Golf, the Audi TT, and the Audi A8. When she left the Volkswagen group, she formed a consultancy outside of the car industry. She returned to automotive when a former colleague joined Lucid as the head of design and reached out to her.

Magnusson’s team is responsible for every tactile element on both the exterior and interior. “There are so many parts that are all equally enchanting and important,” she says. “Every single material that goes in the car is not just a given. Making sure the leather has the right sound, touch, and feel to it. I was telling a colleague about a guy I used to work with a guy who would actually touch the materials with his teeth.”

The Lucid Air is an electric sedan that represents the look and feel of California, an aesthetic core to the young company’s roots. What a new brand like Lucid must do is very different from a brand that means something to people.

Solving for the Future of Car Design

At a legacy brand the challenge to design for the future is a tricky one. Each innovation means changing something loved by a previous generation of buyers. Well known automakers navigate constant tension between history and futurism, and just how far to push things to stay on the edge. As cars become more advanced, new skills are needed to move car design forward in creative ways. Car designs studios are no longer made up of only car enthusiasts. Mobile, sound, and graphic designers play key roles in the process and the final product.

Julian Thomsen is head of design for Jaguar, a brand known for beautiful icons such as the E-Type. Original 1960s E-Types command high dollars on the auction blocks, and are testament to the notion that beautiful cars never go out of style. Thomsen sees a shift in the emerging designers’ mindsets who will create the next generation of vehicles.

“When I was in college, there were all petrol heads. They’re a more serious bunch now, the young designers,” he says. “They’re much more responsible, they're much more concerned. They want to have a greater purpose in life than perhaps people of my generation did when they were 20. And that's good to see as well. They want to create a product, which has some significance and meaning.”

This sense of mission is essential to keep design exciting, because the future of car design is primed for more change. And that’s what makes the field so appealing, to envision the way our streets will look in the future.

Even after all of these years, Thomsen is convinced he has the dream job. He is only the third design director in the brand’s history. “Can you imagine what it's like to actually be able to draw something on the back of an envelope and then someone gives you millions of pounds to actually go and make this thing real? You see it driving around in the street years later. That's something your team created. That's an incredible privilege. Any car, no matter what it is, has a level of enthusiasm, has some sort of a fan base, has a following, and people are really watching it.”