Advice
Tips and tricks on how to break into the car design industry
Car Design News rounds up all of the best advice from top designers across the globe to help you become a car design expert
Becoming a car designer is a career of passion and creativity. It is by no means viewed as an ‘easy’ career, instead it is classed as a career of hard work carried out by talented individuals – but with all that talent must come a strong work ethic.
It comes as no surprise then that one of the most common questions Car Design News receives is – how do I become a successful car designer? Well, thanks to our unrivalled access to car design maestros across the globe, we have collected a wide range of advice just for you.
This is a living, breathing article, so bookmark this page for any further insights that drop as we continue to speak to automotive design leaders.
Bob Boniface – retired director of exterior design at Cadillac
“AI tools have gotten so good, but a lot of designers in schools these days rely solely on the tool rather than the emotion.
The use of Vizcom gets a little stale because they're letting AI fill in the blanks, so to speak. My piece of advice would be pencil and paper. Of course, you have to use the virtual tools and the AI tools at some point, but don't start with that. There’s no substitute for the act of your brain telling your hand what to do. It's almost like reading. When you read, you educate yourself, or if you're studying for exam, you read, you take notes. When you take notes, it imprints it into your brain. You have to go through that emotional connection from your head to your hand.
The best designers coming out of school now are excellent artists. They know how to draw a car – in fact, they know how to draw everything. 2D skills are still the foundation that every designer should have. And that just makes you better when you use the AI tools or the virtual surfacing tools.
You have to start with the fundamentals, and the fundamentals will never change as far as I'm concerned. When we're hiring someone, we really want to know how they think, how they problem solve and how they evaluate a design. We're not hiring them because they showed us a nice image, so they should be cautious on how much they rely on AI-generated portfolios.”
Gilles Vidal – head of design, Europe, Stellantis
“Original creativity is number one, but without being naive. I see too many young students that want to do their design that they’ve dreamt about since they were 10 years old, and they want to convince the company that they should produce this. But that's not how it works. They need to be super creative, fresh in their creativity.
When they browse Pinterest to see some nice sketches, they shouldn't copy that, they should aim be better. The greatest examples they find on the Internet should already look like the past to them – they should now think, what's next? What do I bring to the table? They should also be able to adapt to the brand – so tailor their portfolio to the specific brand they are applying for.
Essentially, if they are able to create the next best thing, they’ll get a job instantly.”
Tisha Johnson – head of design at Slate
“Young designers know what it's like to work hard and they are stepping into a career that will bring them the most difficult mountains to climb. It will be hard from the very first day until they hang up their hats as designers. But the payoff is that you are pursuing something that you are truly in love with. And that emotional connection creates the most rewarding experience. Therefore, my advice is to pursue it and just keep going.”
Mitja Borkert – design director at Lamborghini
"If I were 20 years younger, I would recommend — and encourage — anyone who has the opportunity to take a sidestep. Maybe do a job rotation: spend a year in product planning, a year in finance, or perhaps in production. It will make you smarter and give you valuable experience. Afterwards, I believe it will also create more opportunities in the future. Because we are all creative minds, but management and leadership skills are things we have to learn and experience over time. If you take these sidesteps, you grow more, gain more experience, and ultimately create more value as a designer inside the company.”
Andrew Smith – retired executive director of advanced design at General Motors
“I'd say an analytical mindset. Someone who's willing to open their eyes and assume that what they think is real may not actually be real. Someone who's prepared to question what they think is right. They also need to be comfortable with ambiguity. And they need to be able to recognise patterns, even when those patterns aren't immediately obvious.
You start asking yourself, am I noticing this because it's genuinely happening, or because the algorithm on my phone is showing it to me? You begin to see lots of little things happening. What does that actually mean? It's about having the mindset of always wanting to know more.”
José Navarro – head of design at Italdesign
“First of all, I don't want anybody that doesn’t have passion for design, because this is the most important thing. I am almost 60 years old, but I have a lot of passion for my work because I love it. Everybody who surrounds me needs to have this passion. But one thing is passion, another thing is romanticism. They are not the same. You have to use it to change things and develop for the future.”
Alberto Piccolo – advanced design lead at Pagani
“This is something that I really believe in, but also Mr. Pagani, who is teaching us that to have a lot of freedom and fantasy, you must also have some rules already deep inside of your mind.
Today, students have access to a lot of new tools, like AI or whatever, but you can never settle on the easy side of that, because a good result is always made by your mind. Maybe you can do better sketches or renderings with new tools, but in the end, you have to know the rules about how to design and how to draw — technical drawings, using cylinders, pyramids and everything like that. Otherwise you have no basis. It's like a home: you can make a nice home, a nice building, but with no structural support iit will not work. I think ia good idea is much better than a good drawing. Because a good drawing doesn't mean it has good content, whereas a good idea can have a bad drawing. The importance is in the content.”
Jozef Kaban – VP of design at SAIC
“I believe the younger generation may be better than we were. When I see how they draw and how they perform, it’s great. But the world is more hectic. Everyone is impatient. Everyone has to deliver immediately. And immediate results are usually not deep enough. If you want to be quick, you stay on the surface. If you need to do something quickly, the first thing I say is: don’t start. Go and talk. Think first. Spend time clarifying the true target. Don’t think it’s wasted time. If you talk precisely at the beginning, you save discussion at the end. If you don’t talk at the beginning, in the end there will be a lot of discussion.”
Jiaqi Wang – senior exterior designer at Lynk & Co
“(As a woman in design) you’ll normally have a different vision and say things differently, which is natural. You should stand by this, and you shouldn’t hold it back just to fit in. I believe this industry is constantly looking for designers who can actually push boundaries and whether it’s through smart functionality or through new aesthetics. This unique viewpoint is our advantage. Of course, it’s important to master the technical skills, but it’s more important to trust your own vision.”
Full roundtable interview here.
Simon Loasby – head of global design at Hyundai
"We need to pull the best out of everybody and create a space for all to thrive. At a fundamental level, you need to get everyone smiling. A happy designer is a creative designer. You get more cool stuff done, and the job becomes easier.”
Robert Lesnik – director of exterior design at Mercedes
“Young people often try something and if it doesn't work out, they move on to the next thing. And when you interview young people today, they are not huge petrolheads, they want to give it a try because they saw a tutorial on YouTube that looked cool. It's very seldom to find these petrolheads, they're just not super passionate about it. So the first thing is your mindset. You have to prove that passion, and not just with nice sketches. I failed three times before I got my first in car design. So be passionate and stick with it.”
Marc Newson – industrial designer, creative director and artist
“I grew up in a time before computers, before the internet, so I learned drawing and modelling – making things. Don’t lose that. Continue to work at this level, don’t rely on the computer, however useful it may be as a tool.”
Romulus Rost – former group designer at Volkswagen
“The experience you have from one field can always be brought to another. I'm not a fan of separating those functions, making little islands or workspaces. You need to have this exchange in design experience.”
Raphael Bretecher – European head of interiors at Hyundai
“In car design, you have to find fresh ideas. It’s very important that young designers show character, be a bit of a maverick, and provoke things. It may work, or it may not, but at least it’s something fresh. That’s much more important than having people who are just following the format, doing exactly what is expected. That’s nice, but everybody does that. To have disruptive ideas, I think, is the future. It’s what we need to move forward."
Giorgetto Giugiaro – Italian design maestro
“Everyone looks around and can see many things. Films, museums, art. We absorb these inputs as humans even without knowing. And when we draw, when we design, we don’t realise that our creativity comes from the creativity of other people.”
Julian Thomson – design director at General Motors Advanced Design Europe
“If I look at a portfolio and see somebody can draw a cool sketch of a car on a post-it note, they’ve got my interest. If they can do another car on the same bit of paper which is just as good, they probably have the job because it shows that the first car wasn’t a fluke.”
