By design.

A common question that we hear here at AD&P is "How do I become an automotive designer?" While the questioner is typically a student, that's not invariably the case. Often, people who are already undertaking a career path realize that there is another road that seems more appealing. Or, another way of looking at it is that when it comes to jobs in the auto industry, being a designer is one hell of a lot sexier than, say, being an engineer. Not that we have anything against engineers. In Fact, one of our Friends, Geoff Wardle, who is a professor at Art Center in Pasadena, once counseled a wanna-be car designer by noting that he, Wardle, had always wanted to be a professional car designer but first graduated with a degree in mechanical and vehicle engineering before attending the Royal College of Art's Automotive Design graduate program. He wrote to the prospective designer, "I have always Found that my engineering background helped me tremendously in my career."

The allure of car design is captured in a fine way by Jonathan Bell in Concept Car Design: Driving the Dream (RotoVision; $35). This is a sumptuous, well-designed (go Figure) tome that looks at how the work is done (Face it: enjoyable though if may be, if is still work), then looks at concept vehicles and designers who bring these dream cars to life. Although the book can be paged through simply for the gorgeous photographs printed on heavy, quality paper stock [the captions are printed in type smaller than the one print on the contract for a Faustian car lease], Jackson does provide some interesting observations in the main body text, such as, when describing how the past is often prelude to concepts to come, he writes: "The hermetic world of the motor industry, from education through to career, coupled with the tangled web of allegiances, technology partnerships, and ownerships that characterize the modern industry, also makes self-reference inevitable." I couldn't have said it better myself--GSV