Audi Al 2 Open End

Who invents a car brand’s design language? People do, silly.

These people go on to do different things, naturally, and in many respects car design staff can be compared with any other top-level artists, from animation to model-making, calligraphy, and the plain ol’ fine arts we all love so much.

Often, when these same talented people get together to design A Thing, recognition is delayed or the achievement is later parlayed into opportunities with another company or in another location. (Unless you’re Mercedes-Benz legend Bruno Sacco.)

Multiply this churn and burn across thousands of people, hundreds of car companies and industrial design firms; and consider in awe the vast amount of Things these artists accomplish each year.

Uniquely in the car world, when companies hire design staff, they toil under an umbrella of corporate mélange, the visual language Art of Things then becoming the umbrella by which Things are internally politic’d; stamped out by professional metal crafters, wires laid by learned electrical engineers, assessed for risk by lawyers and so on.

Design staff, let’s call them artists out of respect, are very rarely tenured professionals who are able to steer a car brand’s vast array of models through an expensive, mercurial industry that provides millions of jobs under that same Art umbrella to then produce Things and earn Money. 

Almost there.