Seventh Engine

When I applied to the Ontario College of Art, now known as—and in my opinion, detrimentally so…shhh, I’m still a student there—the Ontario College of Art & Design University, it was with the hopes of studying Industrial Design as a pre-cursor to a career in automotive design. It wasn’t long into my attendance there that I realized the realities of the car design world required talents that I simply did not have. Seriously, it’s a different breed of human being designer that is successful in that field. I also learned that there is so much else to be designed and my attention and interest was quickly drawn away from the automotive world into product design and graphic design. Fortunately, cars are a flourishing hobby of mine that I think might suffer were I spending my career trying to perfect cup holders and headrest buttons. In fact, they may be too far up in the echelon of interior components. Regardless, I know enough to realize I certainly wouldn’t be penning the lines of the actual vehicle. Nevertheless, I’ve found my way—rather, I’m finding my way through whatever this abyss of creative spoils is that I call a “career” and have so far settled into graphic design. Ironically, as it turns out, based on the article I am writing about here, my passion for typography leaves me wondering is maybe I could have had some success in the automotive design world. Ok…maybe not, it really is a battle field of skill.

In collecting research for a Typography Research Paper I am presently writing for a course at OCADU, I came across this article on Medium.com. The article essentially discusses how Art Center College of Design recognizes similarities between type design and automotive design—or, more accurately, similarities in the processes of each.

“In our curriculum at Art Center, everybody has to take typography,” explains Karim Habib, head of BMW design at BMW Group and Art Center graduate. “Those guys are masters of proportion.”

It’s the beginning of a series of articles that I will certainly be following and if you’re interested in automotive design, typography, or both as is my case, it’s definitely an article worth checking out.

Medium.com
Art Center College of Design
Ontario College of Art & Design University