Style Setters and Style Followers // Mar 10, 04:59 PM
Top: BMW 5 series 2007, bmw.com; middle: Hyundai Elantra 2007, hyundaiusa.com; bottom: Subaru Impreza 2007 at Geneva Car Show, sarajevo-x.com.
I have always been interested in cars. Not in cylinders, horse power or performance, but in the industrial design and styling that goes into their production. It wasn’t until I saw Carlos Segura’s Cartype that I accepted my fascination with both cars and typography to be not all that bizarre.
Erik Spiekermann had frequently used car analogies in his explanations of design and type, but Donald Norman had formalized this interest in a coolest book title ever, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.
There are a number of chassis attributes which define car manufacturers visually (front grille, headlights, tail lights, proportions of pillars, etc.) and most manufacturers seems to consider these embedded in their brand. It gets very interesting to observe the development of new models because the evolution of automotive design is a constant tension between the desire to evolve one’s style and the need to stay in line with one’s established brand vocabulary.
As in any other competitive industry, there are style setter and style followers. Is it hard to come up with an original headlights enclosure shape? I think so. I almost mistook Hyundai Elantra ’07 under a pile of snow for BMW 3 series. Now, Subaru Impreza seems to be riffing off of the same shape.
Need I mention who is the style setter here? BMW foreshadowed the evolution of their lines with the production of 7 series in 2002. It wasn’t until 2004 or 2005, I think, that 3 and 5 series refined this direction. Didn’t BMW 745 implement a type of “scroll-wheel-navigation” in its iDrive system (lambasted by Norman in this article) before even iPods appeared on the market?
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