8 posts tagged “designer”

Someone at Jaguar’s ad agency in London sent me a link to this today: an interview with Jaguar design boss, Ian Callum, on the next XJ saloon.

This may well be the most anticipated saloon launch this year. I can’t wait to see what the new car looks like, especially as it will be very different to the Arthur Daley–John Prescott type.

I enjoy these behind-the-scenes design stories a lot, and check out the video of the designer drawing the new BMW 7-series (F01). From Lucire.

 

I am a sucker for the “could have been” car stories, so stumbling across American designer Herb Grasse’s site was a real bonus today.
   Grasse was associate designer on the original Adam West Batmobile but he worked on many production cars, too, including the original Dodge Challenger, the XD Ford Falcon, the original Ford Laser of 1980, and the second-generation Ford Telstar. He was chief designer at Nissan Australia before its demise.
   Start on Herb’s production cars’ page and link from there—a very fascinating portfolio. It shows the XD Falcon was far more Granada-like at drawing stage, and that the Mazda Familia origins of the Ford Laser were far more obvious in earlier sketches. The first Telstar had shades of the Ford Taurus years before that model’s launch, while a clay for the second Telstar showed strong EA26 Falcon influences.

Yves Saint Laurent, arguably the world’s most famous fashion designer, has died in Paris on Sunday, 11.10 p.m. local time, aged 71, according to the Pierre Bergé-Saint Laurent Foundation. Full obituary detailed today at Lucire.

The opening title to Ashes to Ashes (BBC1, Thursday, 9 p.m.) has made it on to the internet and makes an interesting study.
   The comparisons to Life on Mars are obvious. Star Keeley Hawes narrates an introduction, as John Simm did with the original parent series. It’s taken from a line of dialogue that she delivered to herself in the mirror in the first episode—I think most of us saw that coming.
   Edmund Butt’s music is obviously a homage to his original theme for Life on Mars but with a more energetic electric guitar.
   The typeface chosen is interesting: the 1983-released Neue Helvetica. It’s not exactly what I would have chosen for the 1981 theme. However, this was also expected from the pilot’s opening, as well as the way the words Ashes to Ashes appear on screen, playing on a 1980s computer program.
   It’s clear that this is a related show even if you never saw the first episode and the designers have conveyed its feeling pretty well. Essentially, this is Life on Venus.

My friend Sarah went to the Massey University design school exhibition and this was the one thing that drew her eye, enough for her to grab the business card from the stack there. The designer is Kylie Phillips, a new grad. I want to note that, for me, this is not a public dig at John McGrath, whose image appears on Ms Phillips’ business card. But it does highlight how public images—related here to the 2007 mayoral election in Wellington—are used for humour and satire.

A YouTube member has been posting some beautiful Maurice Binder title sequences, including those from my favourite movies, Arabesque (mysteriously not released on DVD) and Charade. I love the modernist nature of Binder’s work, and while he is best known for the James Bond gun-barrel sequence, there was a lot more to the man’s designs.
   The following two are mated to Henry Mancini scores for Stanley Donen films.

   Another favourite (again with Mancini, and Donen producing and directing) is this opening from the Audrey Hepburn–Albert Finney film Two for the Road:    A few more to round off this post. We have The Grass Is Greener, which shows that Binder could do a very cute sequence with babies. The second is Raquel Welch packing a parachute in Fathom. Ken Hughes’ Billion Dollar Brain is unusual and less pleasant, but it fits with the tone of the last Harry Palmer film. But even here, Binder’s sense of modernist typography continues.    His style continued into the 1970s and remained, in my view, current for that decade. The last for this post is from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, and is closer to what some associate with Binder (girls and Helvetica). The Marvin Hamlisch song, performed by Carly Simon, is particularly fitting. The titles to Moonraker, which I find to be very 1970s and with a John Barry-composed song, are not yet on YouTube.
   In all cases, there is a sense of timelessness, which shows just how suited the principles of modernism were to title design. These ideas are still often observed by some of the most famous designers out there, such as Wayne Fitzgerald.