Tools, design methods and their influence on form If you were a rich man 150 years ago and were looking to have a horse drawn carriage built for you the carriage maker would give you a scale side view drawing for your approval. It would be just a line drawing without any colour unless you went to a top coach maker where you might get something with a light colour wash. In the earliest days of the car industry manufacturers of small and comparatively inexpensive cars gave the prospective owner no choice of body style and a very limited range of colours, probably black or dark green. If you were a wealthy customer you could have anything you wanted. You would chose your chassis, (similar to what is called the platform today, but drivable) take it to your chosen coach builder and have whatever style of body you wanted, built for it. The method for choosing the style was still the scale side view but coloured using water colour, pastel chalks and Indian ink to show how the car would look. Back in the 1930s when Harley Earl was invited to set up the industrys fist design studio, General Motors Art and color section, the side view was still the car makers method; but for the new shapes that Earl was planning a new drawing style was needed. The studio started to use coloured Canson paper on which they drew with Indian Ink, coloured chalks and pencils and gouache paints. This technique liberated designers, much more rounded forms started to appear. It was the design industrys desire to get rid of bottled coloured inks and a big jar of water on your desk, for gouach and water colour paints, that brought about the development of the Magic Marker. Pots of water and bottles of ink often got knocked over and a whole drawing could be ruined. The marker was a great invention but it tended to produce designs with flat planes and straight edges, the period of folded paper design. In Italy in the 1970s and 80s traditional scale side, plan, front and rear views were still the preferred method, although Ital Design occasionally hired American illustration master Syd Mead to show Giugiaro and his team modern techniques. Two Ital Design cars show how the grey marker part influenced and part supported the current design trend, those two are the first VW Golf and Scirocco. As car design trends moved to more rounded and fluid forms, such as the clumsy but influential Ford Sierra, the marker started to be combined with coloured pencils, glorious ‘Eagle prismapastel’ chalks, ballpoint pens and the classic, black, Pentel six-sided ‘Sign Pen’. At that time both the ballpoint and the Pentel smudged very easily until dry, causing designers to look for ways of saving a drawing. To do this the sketch was often carefully cut out with a surgeons scalpel, using a 10A blade and than stuck down on to a fresh sheet of paper using carcinogenic ‘Spraymount’ glue. Sticky hands, desk and carpet resulted; yes, we used to spray the glue on to the drawing on the floor! One of the masters of the marker and mixed media sketch technique was American designer Dick Nesbitt, his style constantly evolved to both influence and support current form trends, his colours were always bold and innovative. Then came Photoshop, lines, forms and colours were generated digitally and it seemed like with enough practice almost anyone could produce convincing looking images. Splines and curves were mathematically generated for the designer, there was a certainty that the character of lines from different designers would look similar. Computer generated curves are called Bézier Curves, the maths formulae for these curves were developed by a Frenchman, Paul Bézier, to help him in his design work at Renault, Bézier was responsible for the look of the 1983 Renault 11 ............. err, yes, well!! So when designers use these tools they are using 1980s tools from the designer of the Renault 11. More recently Laurens van den Acker, Renaults current Director of Design was brought in to the company to transform its design language and one of the methods he used was to look for a sketching style that was looser and more emotional than Photoshop. There are a number of painter programmes that are easily mastered and some of these have been influential in finding Renaults new design language. A new design method giving us an exciting new form language.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 17:30:00 +0000
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