Design Matters by Del Coates

 

The success of any new car hinges largely on the novelty of its design. Visually, it must somehow differ from its predecessors in order to catch the eye, stir passions, and stoke desires. Like a newspaper or novel, a car becomes less interesting and exciting once you have read it. So car designers, like journalists and novelists, are necessarily caught up in an incessant cycle of coming up with the “next new thing.”

So why should retro design themes—like those of the Porsche Boxster, Chrysler’s PT Cruiser and Prowler, Volkswagen’s New Beetle, and the revived Mini—appeal so much? What did Ford hope to gain with a new T-Bird that reminded us of old T-Birds?

Nostalgia, that “bittersweet longing for revered things of the past,” is the easy answer. But the complete answer has an ironic twist: A retro theme can be so old that it seems refreshingly new and unfamiliar; but, at the same time, it seems comfortably familiar. Retro themes provide simultaneous doses of psychic tension, due to novelty, and psychic comfort due to familiarity. The most appealing new shoes are comfortable enough to remind us of our old shoes.

Retro also has purely practical implications. Coming up with something truly original, that doesn’t remind viewers of what’s already out there, is the most demanding aspect of any creative endeavor, be it literature, painting, music or car design. Responding to the same operative trends, designers at different companies are likely to come up with designs that look much alike. Just ask any designer. Just ask any car buyer trying to find a car that’s truly unique.

Solving this problem by reaching back for a look that is so old that it’s new is as old as art and design themselves. As the fashion industry learned eons ago, recycling themes is the simplest way to continually come up with something “new.”

As a bonus, Ford’s T-Bird heritage provided an exclusive preserve for its designers to explore. Just as only Volkswagen dared to recreate the Beetle, no one else had license, in effect, to emulate the T-Bird. Exercising their license guaranteed Ford a relatively unique design that others weren’t inclined to copy.

The exterior design satisfied the primary aesthetic condition of newness by differing enough from the competition to stand out. Neither did it slavishly copy the earlier Birds that inspired it.

Some details, like the grille and headlights, brought to mind the first-generation 1955-57 T-Bird. The circular elements surrounding the fog lights were meant to evoke the tubular bumper guards of the original. But their flattened form bothered me because they seemed cheap and toy-like. 

The third-generation 1961-63 T-Bird inspired it more. Fortunately, designers chose to emulate the ‘61 windshield rather than the wraparound version of the first Bird. It is more compatible with the new design. And it lends some visual speed and boldness to the design.

The headlights of the new model, which seem at first to have nothing in common with earlier themes, amount to perhaps the cleverest visual bridge to the original. You can see on close examination that the original’s headlights were also set into oval openings. By flipping one and rotating it just so, you can see the visual similarities of the old and new designs. [Fig. 4]

A Proper Soul

Foremost among all means for making a car seem normal and appropriate, it must seem alive—as though it has a soul. Next to finding an original theme, conjuring just the right soul for a car taxes the creative and aesthetic skills of a designer more than any other task.

If you are to love a car, it must have a proper, respectable soul. This means that, among other things, it should seem active, as though it is making its way through the environment, not succumbing to it. It should seem agile, too, not awkward. An SUV must seem especially robust. We expect a sports car to seem fast and aggressive.

The new T-Bird seems alive and agile. It also seems fast. But we could hardly call it aggressive. True to its heritage, it is a special kind of sports car—a charming boulevardier rather than a testosterone-charged sprinter like the Viper. It visually slips bird-like through the air rather than brusquely forcing its way.

Its profile sets the tone and, in fact, accounts for much of the car’s so-old-it’s-new novelty. Like its predecessors, it echoes classic airplane-inspired forms—the teardrop and the airfoil—that preceded the modern rocket-inspired wedge. [Fig. 1] It shares this older theme with only a few of today’s cars, including the Porsche 911. Unlike the high-tailing Corvette, the high point of its fender profile lies far forward, near the windshield, more like the ‘61 Bird’s. The ‘55 Bird’s profile crested so far forward that it virtually defined a backwards wedge.

Clichés

At the other extreme of creative effort, cliches provide the easiest way to make a design seem normal. No designer wants to be associated with clichés, but they all are—out of necessity. Cliches are habits, like walking and brushing teeth, that a designer uses automatically without thinking. Indeed, it is hard for a designer to not use clichés because they come to mind so readily. Like other habits, clichés conserve brainpower. It is impractical or impossible to think through the reasons behind every last detail in order to justify its form on functional, economic, or other respectable grounds. If you had to think about walking or designing every last detail, you couldn’t pay attention to more pressing matters. There are limits, of course. No one appreciates lazy designers who ponders nothing and uses only cliches to end up with designs that are utterly predictable and commonplace.

Clichés ease the viewer’s task, too, because they are so predictable. When a novel starts out with “It was a dark and stormy night,” the reader knows pretty much what to expect. Predictably, the new T-Bird has cast wheels with spokes instead of wheels more reminiscent of hub-capped wheels common during the 1950s and 1960s.

Clichés have limited lifetimes. The first three generations of T-Birds featured a popular cliché in the form of skirts that hid much of their rear wheels. Skirts were so commonplace in the 1950s that designers hardly dared to exclude them from their designs. This was especially true of the 1955 when the first T-Bird arrived.

Skirts would have built another retro bridge between old and new Birds. [Fig. 2] They would have also brought the bonus of additional novelty (only the Honda Insight has them today). But the would have been in direct conflict with more contemporary clichés—those cast wheels and the open wheel wells needed to see them. Skirts might seem more appropriate—and attractive—if you happen to know that they can reduce air drag by as much as 10 percent (the reason the Insight and speed-record cars have them).

Concinnity

A quality I call objective concinnity constitutes the most basic way of ensuring that a car’s design seems appropriate. Concinnity comes from an Old Latin word meaning “a skillful arrangement of parts.”  The uniform gaps and aligned panels of good fit and finish are about concinnity. So are parallel lines and right angles. Regardless of an appropriate soul warm appeals to nostalgia, a car with poor fit and finish blows it aesthetically.

Most dictionaries equate concinnity with harmony, symmetry, and elegance: Harmony involves regularity, repetition, and proportion. Symmetry involves reflected repetition. Elegance involves an absence of complexity and excess. I call it objective concinnity because, unlike such subjective matters as soul and nostalgia, we can measure it objectively with rulers, protractors, and other instruments.

[Fig. 1] Some examples of concinnity are obvious in the side view of the T-Bird. The curve of the A-pillar (A) lines up with one of the front wheel’s spokes and passes through the wheel’s center. This curve is also symmetrical with the rear profile of the top (B), which is, in turn, parallel with the tail. The rear edge of the door is aligned with the center of the porthole and the transition between upper and rear surfaces of the top. (I can’t vouch for the precision of these observations, of course, because they are subject to the distortions of perspective in the photo. In any case, it’s what seems to be so the counts.)

One of the most remarkable and unusual examples of symmetry occurs in the virtual identity of the headlights and taillights. Their lenses (E & F) are symmetrical; so are the elliptical recesses holding the lights (G & H). Finally, note that the small chrome elements in the fender “vent” are perpendicular to the A-pillar.

Unlike clichés, which come and go over time, objective concinnity is timeless; once a car is designed, it neither gains nor loses its original share. Consequently, it is associated with the appeal of lasting beauty. All timeless classics have it in abundance.

A car can have too much objective concinnity. Symmetry could be carried to such extremes, for example, that the front and rear ends of the car would be virtually identical. [Fig. 3] Whereas left-right symmetry of a car’s front or rear view is OK, fore and aft symmetry would slow the car visually to a halt because the impression of movement requires asymmetry. The result would be a serious loss of soul.

In the final analysis, the new T-Bird has enough modern clichés to stay in step with the times and remain appealing over the near term. Its nostalgic references to the highly regarded early Birds ensures a relatively indefinite appeal. Its appropriate soul guarantees even more lasting appeal. An ample amount of objective concinnity suggests that it will have relatively timeless appeal. Only time will tell, however, whether it has enough to earn classic status.