Aesthetics - Car Body Design (2024)

Publications > Car Design Publications > Aesthetics

Baking Up a New Look, in Layers

by: Phil Patton | Source: The New York Times

The BMW i8 may be the most futuristic looking car on the road. But elements of its sliced-and-angled appearance, which might be called the layered look, are starting to show up on other vehicles and hint at an emerging trend in auto design. Layering is key to the “stream flow” design language of BMW’s “i” […]

Published on 23 October 2014

Speaking the Buick language: capturing, understanding, and exploring brand identity with shape grammars

by: Jay P McCormack, Jonathan Cagan, Craig M Vogel | Document type: Paper | Source: Carnegie Mellon University

Developing and maintaining a consistent brand statement is an important aspect of developing a successful product. However, maintaining that statement is difficult due in part to the inconsistent and often insufficient understanding of brand by marketing, engineering, and industrial design. This paper presents shape grammars as a method for encoding the key elements of a […]

Published on 3 November 2013

Emotional Car Design and good talents

by: Luciano Bove | Year: 2010 | Document type: ARTICLE | Source: Luciano Bove

When we listen to talk about car design often we hear words like "cool, love it, hate it, beautiful car, sexy, muscle car, strong carachter, dall, sad, happy, elegant, show off…." at so on. What is all this about? About what are we really talking? It is clear to me that to describe the Design […]

Published on 28 September 2010

Semantic Analysis of Chinese Adjectives: A New Approach to Mapping the Form-based Metaphors in Automobile Styling

by: Wenquan Zhang, Jianghong Zhao and Fangzhen Zou (Hunan University, P.R. China) | Year: 2009 | Document type: PAPER | Source: IASDR 2009

It could be argued that human experiences are full of conceptual and emotional metaphors. Metaphors are a significant part of language and play an important role in structuring human perception. Therefore it is ubiquity to find that people use different adjectives to express their emotional reactions toward an automobile styling. 3000 Chinese Adjectives in daily […]

A Feature-Line-Based Descriptive Model of Automobile Styling and Application in Auto-design

by: Danhua Zhao, Jianghong Zhao, Hao Tan | Year: 2009 | Document type: PAPER | Source: IASDR 2009

The knowledge of automobile styling and form shows significant signs of hard to capture and represent because it is mainly composed of the implicit knowledge of designers. It could be argued that a well-defined feature line, which conveys the information of the automobile styling an d the vehicle body structure, would be the efficient way […]

Published on 16 April 2010

Japanese Aesthetics in Design

by: Leon Witherow | Year: 2009 | Document type: ARTICLE | Source: Vehicle4Change

Contemporary Japanese life is embedded with rich cultural, religious and spiritual traditions. These traditions inform and dictate the way in which Japanese people live their daily life and also in the way the material world is constructed around them. These traditions go beyond merely a few simple guidelines by which to live ones life- rather […]

Published on 5 May 2009

Towards semantic modelling applied to car aesthetics: a proposal

by: C. Catalano, J-C. LÃ©on, B. Falcidieno, F. Giannini, V. Cheutet, J-P. Pernot, M. Monti | Year: 2006 | Document type: PRESENTATION | Source: AIM@SHAPE

This presentation summarizes the authors’ research activities in the field of modeling tools for aesthetic industrial design. Starting from the requirements of the stylists during the conceptual design phase, geometric tools for shape manipulation have been proposed, which act on the geometric entities significant for the user. The ongoing work aims at integrating such tools […]

Published on 22 June 2007

Design Thinking: White Roofs Are Cool

by: Reilly Brennan | Year: 2007 | Document type: ARTICLE | Source: Winding Road

White roofs are set to rise in popularity in the coming years, and the reasons arenâ€™t purely cosmetic. Current white roofers MINI, Toyota FJ Cruiser, and Ford Flex have carved out a unique design for themselves based on this treatment, but the reality is that there are energy-saving benefits, too.

Published on 8 June 2007

Reflection lines: shape in automotive design

by: Gerald Farin (Arizona State University), Dianne Hansford (3D Compression Technologies) | Year: 2002 | Document type: ARTICLE | Source: TIES Magazine

Reflection lines are an important tool for judging shape in automotive design. Gerald and Dianne look at the evolution of the design cycle, and argue that shape analysis tools in CAD (Computer Aided Design) have played an important role in evolutionizing the design cycle.

Published on 28 April 2007

Harmonious colors

by: Klaus Pfenning (Clariant) | Year: 2001 | Document type: ARTICLE | Source: Clariant Publications

Even colors that seem the same can change in different light conditions. Clariant has developed a new color concept for automobile interior design that creates the same prerequisites for different materials.