Many cars today are ‘overdesigned’, according to Luca Fioravanti, son of the famous Ferrari designer. Has the pen and the paper had its day? And is graphic design proving to be an obstacle to a designer’s inner creativity?

It’s one of the hottest topics stirring up debate amongst leading automotive designers. 

“In the last year, there has been more graphic design than design itself,” Mr Fioravanti says. “Some of the main German brands are doing more graphic design instead of serious design. We don’t know if this can prove to be successful.” Luca says too much emphasis on graphic design could have a negative impact on car brands in the long-run. 

“Some brands are perceived by the consumer as very serious and this seriousness has to be respected by the designers.”

David Hilton's fashionable dress sense is reflected in his automotive work.

David Hilton, formerly Head of Exterior Design for Bentley, believes every good car needs only three ‘strong lines’ to make it work. “As humans, we read things graphically first,” he says. “Take the Volkswagen Beetle for example, you can draw it with three lines and everyone gets it. The difference comes in the sculpture. The 2D lines need movement in order to come to life. This becomes the difference between a cartoon and a real person.”

One person who shares a similar view to Mr Hilton’s is Chrysler’s Head of Design, Brandon Faurote.

“A lot of what we do has to do with surface and sculpture but it really does start with the proportions of the car meeting the graphics of the car,” he explains. 

From the wheels to the centre line, the shape of the windows and even the feature lines, many modern elements that are essential for a car to function are a graphic and are rarely drawn from scratch. 

“They say in design school that you should be able to design a car with three lines and still be able to tell what it is. That’s one way to measure whether you have a timeless design or not. If there are too many lines, it may not be so timeless and you may need to simplify it. 

“If you think about the front of a car, for example, the grill shape and the headlamp shape, all of these things are graphics that are very critical to the design so it really is about this inner play of graphics and then the sculpture that connects them together.”

In 2005, Mr Faurote received the prestigious ‘Young Leadership & Excellence Award’ from the Automotive Hall of Fame for representing the next generation of leadership in the automotive industry.

“We’re doing a lot more stuff electronically, much more than when I started 20 years ago. We do a lot of electronic sketching and electronic surfacing, but we still have a lot of clay model development so we still look at things manually and we still need to touch and see things and use our hands to hand craft things. 

“We still think there’s an artistic touch there that you need to have so we use both of those tools, depending on the application, to make sure that the customer gets something that at the end of the day is very modern and futuristic and also has the human touch, so to speak.”

Few designers use only the drawing board for their designs as with electronic sketching, everything is created on layers, allowing errors to be moved individually by pressing ‘Ctrl + Z’ or the ‘Undo’ button. 

“I don’t want to say it’s harder or easier,” he adds. “I just think there are different tools. To some extent, if you use those tools to your benefit, and really know the right time to use them, it can be a positive for a designer. A designer 20 years ago might do a rendering or a sketch and have put two hours into it, let’s say, and if you made one wrong move with the stroke of your pen, you’d have to crumple up your paper and start all over again.” 

Designers today can work faster and more efficiently than before the age of high-end graphic design software. 

Ernst Reim, Chief Interior Designer for Ford of Europe concluded that ‘graphic design is becoming more and more important’. 

“When you look at the instrument panel, the general layout and architecture is linked to graphic design,” he explains. “And when you look at the details and the graphic design of the layout on the screen, there is so much going on and as a designer, you have to have the correct readability. It means that you have to have a good graphic on the screen so that when you look at it for just one second, you have to understand what is going on so you can adjust anything as needed in the car in the graphic design software.”

Designers are spoilt with the range of creative software suites available today. From Adobe Photoshop, Bunkspeed and HDR Light Studio, Autodesk remains a firm favourite with designers.