1959 Cadillac Eldorado tail light

Let’s move on to automobile styling. Many cars produced in the last decade have a very similar ‘born in a wind tunnel’ look to them. This is because of a push for fuel economy, greenness. A car shape can make a big difference to drag and therefore fuel consumption. Now if every car manufacturer wants good fuel consumption results and have spent years optimizing the engine efficiency they must really have some brand styling to make their cars more appealing than a competitor. Along with the styling comes a degree of ‘quality’, reliability and brand identity positions to make the car more desirable.

Not much difference on display here

To create eye catching styling, but remaining aerodynamic auto designers have been designing ‘within the shape’. Mostly they alter the lighting panels within the shape and also the side and area of the windows. Notable are the new Astra and C3 windscreens and the rear lighting panels on ther Civic.

The 2009 Honda Civic lighting back panel

A lot of auto design styling uses transparent sections, lights areas and shapes. Incidentally I have personally noticed the back of many newer model cars look like cartoon animal faces, German cars are mostly angry bears.

You can look at car reliability tables and the most recent tables I saw put Honda at the top and Renault at the bottom. Though Honda aren’t the most expensive cars, people pay heavy premiums for many European marques such as BMW, Audi and Jaguar which also rank lower in the reliability tables than American brands like Ford.

Compare and contrast wind tunnel designs above and the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado from the golden age of motoring!

1959 Cadillac front profile

Personally, because outrageous Harley Earl designs are no longer available, I just choose my car based upon functionality; economy, size and reliability. Interestingly, Nissan has produced a vintage styled modern engined small car called the Figaro, I hope this trend will be built upon and bring more style choices to us.

Figaro would be much more cool with enclosed rear wheels and tailfins...

What the future holds for car design with fuel prices now at £1.20 per litre is surely even more efficiency considerations and alternative fuel source hybrid developments. Lets also hope for a bit more styling variety.

I’ve just found a great link of the Top 10 Concept Cars of the Fifties, containing lots of great pictures of 50′s concept cars including Harley Earl’s day to day car, the 1951 General Motors Le Sabre. Check it out, well worth a look!

Design Reviews T-shirt Obama edition

The quality of the design is only matched by the quality of the material! The shirt is made of 100% certified combed organic cotton, with twin needle stitching at the neck, sleeves and hem. AND it’s not produced in a sweat shop in a third world country either.

The design was lovingly created with a paid for commercial full copy of Adobe Illustrator, thereby keeping workers in the USA in employment. The fetching background Obama was realised with the help of the wonderful little program I have reviewed previously, Raster.

These shirts are a limited edition with no more than 500 being produced. One shirt costs 25UKP or 35USD, go to our merchandise page and order lots NOW!

Twelve Tunisian doors

What an inspirational image on which to base some pop art or arches based illustration using your favourite graphics package. I’m working on some imagery based upon the above, but I’m not sure if it’s best to concentrate on just one door, they’re all so interesting!

What has that got to do with Design Reviews? Well the huge robot Gort is a very cool robot design and I was sidetracked last night while designing a logo to do a version of Gort in Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s pretty nice and you can see it below.

Gort

Also out of huge generosity and Christmas spirit I have uploaded some ‘Gort wallpaper’ for your desktop. It’s available in lots of sizes to match your screen 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024 and a big one at 1365×1024. Also even more incredibly I’ve uploaded the Adobe Illustrator (v8 for compatibility) file for you to download, to see how it’s drawn or so you can modify it, such as move the ‘klaatu barada nikto’ text around to suit your own desktop. Please if you do anything like that write a little comment on my page, or DIGG it or something!

Anyway all these shops have many kinds of logos, some don’t, they just have some Chinese writing. Last week on my way to Taichung City (pop. 1,064,440) I shot these logos with my phone-cam, an old Sony K800i. Partly because of my inspiration from LogoDesignLove and partly because some of the logos are cool, stylish or funny. Take a look below, 15 logos in 15 minutes…

Traveling to Taichung city centre, I shot these logos with my cameraphone

Have you every ventured into Pants Kingdom or La Fatte? Everyone must recognise Domino’s Pizza. Now I wish I’d spent more time taking some more/better shots.

Cheers, Mark

The Design Reviews logo + 'Raster'

My first review here on Design Reviews is of a FREE graphics utility (for Windows only, sorry Mac users). It might be free but it’s fantastic and fills a gap not addressed in any of the Adobe suite such as Flash, Illustrator or Photoshop.

Do you like sometimes to use halftone patterns as fills? It’s quite easy to do solid colour (same size dot) patterns but what about variable dot sizes corresponding to lightness and darkness of the images you want to create.

New Jordanian Bridge

The program in question is called Raster, it creates dot or square halftone patterns in a vector format which can then be used in your favourite design programs with all the advantages of a vector file (mainly scalability and editability). Now I know there is a Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop but it’s not at all the same as this. The Photoshop filter doesn’t create vector output, also the dot or line styles are uniform. In Raster the dots size vary with intensity or depth of colour. So for instance with a simple linear gradient the dots will fade from large to small where the gradient would fade from dark to light. Before this program I used to try and do the effect ‘by hand’ which was neither convenient or satisfactory.

Try it for yourself, if you’ve read this and made some Pop Art using Raster and your favourite vector editor please leave a link in the comments below.

Raster Screen Grab

Cheers, Mark

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results. What do you think?

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

If you are interested in CD and LP covers there is a great resource on the web which you might not know about – lpcoverlover.com. This is a great site with some of the most bizarre LP covers you have ever seen.