Blog designophile
By Michael DiTullo - October 8, 2011
About four years ago I had the rare opportunity to start collaborating with Jonathan Ward, founder of Icon. Jonathan and his team hand build limited edition vehicles in California. Calling them vehicles is almost an insult, they are rolling testaments to what happens when you go the extra mile on every single detail. The vehicles don’t have headlights, they have LED assemblies made by the same people who made the lights for the Mars rover. They don’t have paint jobs, they have electrostatically applied powder coated finishes. The emblems are hand cast by a jeweler. The upholstery is made by Chilewich. When people say things like “They don’t build them like they used to,” tell them to look up Jonathan.
This is not the kind of object you use and toss. Its very existence nurtures its owner’s desire to keep it, to take care of it and be proud of it. Working with Jonathan reminds me a bit of something that frog’s founder, Hartmut Esslinger, once wrote:
Blog designophile
By Michael DiTullo - June 5, 2011
Automobiles are one of the most difficult objects to represent two dimentionally, yet they frequently fill the doodle-verse of many a designer. Perhaps their elusive complexity compels us to try to draw them onto the page. Or, maybe it is their emotional relevance, the way many people overlay their own personality onto vehicles, that begs designers to capture their essence on the page. Whatever the attraction, Adam Hubers, a designer at Chrysler and Matt Marrocco, an industrial designer and frequent core77 discussion forum poster, have been developing a book to help us to better understand how to translate these objects of desire onto the page. Contents include global automotive brands, global design schools, global auto show dates and locations, reference materials in both print and web format, commonly used proportions and packages, and 100+ pages of templates to practice with.
Check out the book's site and pre-order >>> HERE
Support them on Kickstarter >>> HERE
Blog designophile
By Michael DiTullo - April 30, 2011
As designers, we often engage in many of what we call "future of..." programs, for both clients as well as for ourselves. These projects often remove some of the constraints that exist in our current product developments cycle to focus on larger macro trends in human behavior and technology to try to look forward into the future. Cynically this is sometimes called crystal ball gazing, but it often it can reveal insights that can help us to course correct more production oriented programs. Hollywood has picked up on how amazing these kinds of future explorations can be in many movies over the past 50 years, such as the way HMI is portrayed in Minority Report (UI which is already looking old) and Iron Man (CAD interface).
Blog designophile
By Michael DiTullo - January 31, 2011
This post was written by frog Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston.
The car is 125 years old. Today, automakers are busy imagining what the next generation of cars will be. What’s different this time is the sheer number of technical, ecological, and social changes at play. It's not hard to imagine that future cars may be very different than anything we’ve seen before. But our roads will be populated not only by these new vehicles, but also by an increasingly deep history of older cars. In other words, the car of the future will also be the car of the past.
